


Hanging by a Moment

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 2000s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chronic Illness, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Multiple Sclerosis, can I just make ‘Run’ by Snow Patrol the entire summary of this fic?, does it count as a fake relationship if you have to pretend to hate each other?, how i met your mother who also happens to be my stepmom, only minor oedipal moments considering the author’s proclivities, quoth my beta: It manages to not have plot but to not drag.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-03-06 10:06:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 44,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18848860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: There are many things that Ben could have tolerated about his parents’ divorce.  That his mother had finally had it with his father’s borderline illegal—or rather, as he liked to put it, borderline legal—company, the shady activities it covered that would doubtlessly end her political career if a reporter got hold of them; that his father had finally had it with the way his mother nags, because sure, he’d thought it was hot twenty years ago, but he is in fact an adult who can actually keep his shit together—all that he would have gotten.  He’d have been wrecked, but he’d have gotten it.His dad leaving his mom for a nineteen-year-old gold-digger though, and his mother not even putting up a fight—that had caught him by surprise.That hadhurt.Be nice to her, Ben,his mother had said on the phone when he’d spoken to her for the first time in five years.She just lost your father.Yeah.  So did I.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OfPillar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfPillar/gifts).



> For Pillar_Of_Salt, who played me like a cheap violin when she threw this prompt into the RFFA chat. Though, to be fair, I made it much less cracky and humorous than she suggested, and blatantly ignored a major point of the prompt, so whO’S LAUGHING NOW.
> 
> This is a modern AU but in my brain it’s like…early 2000s au and not 2019 au for what that’s worth. Except set in Star Wars Land. 
> 
> On a more serious note, I’m not sure how to throw a trigger warning on this fic. It’s one that, if I weren’t the one writing it, would have the potential to be triggering for me because it’s very much about lancing the boil of painful familial dynamics. I aim for catharsis in this, but I also know that my catharsis ain’t everyone else’s, especially on the subject of families. If this summary is Flagging Stuff For You, be gentle with yourself if you feel this fic isn’t right for you.
> 
> Lastly, this fic deals with chronic illness. I hope I have handled it respectfully!

The sides of the highway are lined with snow as Ben drives north.  The radio is getting fuzzy and soon he’ll have to switch over to a different station because the white noise will make his teeth grit. 

He’s not really paying attention to the road at all.  He knows where he’s going and how to get there.  He’s always been good at navigation, and it’s not as though the past five years have wiped the memory of the road home completely from his mind.  Muscle memory takes control as he tries to let his mind go empty except for the radio.

“—minority leadership is declaring that there will no vote and that if the President—”

His mind slides out of focus again.  He’d gotten out of the habit of listening to the radio when he moved into the city.  The radio is for people who drive, something they don’t have to control while they are in their car, but can trust to distract them from whatever inanity their brains are making them dwell upon.  Ben never drives in the city.  The traffic is stupid, the public transit is decent, and whenever he gets behind the wheel of the car he thinks about—

“—Senator Organa commented that the President—”

_So she’s still in the senate._

Ben hadn’t paid attention during the election.  He hadn’t let himself pay attention during the election.  There were reporters hounding him, trying to get him to comment, and what part of _leave me the fuck alone_ didn’t they get?  Twice, his mother’s campaign manager tried to get him to be a little more polite.  _It’ll help if you don’t threaten them, please,_ Kaydel Ko Connix had told him.  Ben had hung up on her.

His mother hadn’t once reached out. 

But there she is in the senate again, making snide comments about a president from a different party and acting as though the world is something she can fix, can make better.  As though she’s not one of the most destructive forces he’s ever encountered.

His phone rings in his lap and Ben looks down at it, then fiddles with the earpiece he’s supposed to wear when he drives and wants to talk on his cell phone.  “Yeah?” he says as he turns off the radio.

“Apologies,” Hux says into his ear.  “I know you’re off for the next week.”

“What do you want?”

“We’re having trouble pinning down the contact information for Palpatine’s exec.  It wasn’t in your summary email.”

“It’s in the directory, Hux.”

“Which one?” Hux asks.  “I don’t know what directories you—”

“Fuck off—it’s on the global hub.  Search for Palpatine and there’s a fucking link.”

“Nothing to flip a table about.”

“I don’t flip tables.”

“Eyewitness accounts beg to differ,” Hux replies acidly.

“Really?  You’re going to do this now?”

“Thank you,” Hux says, his voice clipped, and then, sounding nowhere near sorry, he says, “Condolences once again, Solo,” and hangs up.

Ben leaves the radio off after that.  All his muscles are tense and his grip on the steering wheel is so tight that he wonders if he could rip the thing loose from his car.  “Bet you couldn’t fix even that,” he growls at his father’s ghost.

Bad enough that mom and dad had gotten divorced—now his father had to go and have a heart attack and die.

 _I didn’t even get to say goodbye,_ Ben had thought that first night, when he’d been three sheets to the wind and down half a bottle of rye.  He doesn’t let himself think about the way he’d sobbed, the way he’d vomited into his toilet and gone to sleep with a fuzzy mouth.  Instead, he thinks about the anger that he’s going to need if he has to get through two weeks of being polite to _her_. 

There are many things that Ben could have tolerated about his parents’ divorce.  That his mother had finally had it with his father’s borderline illegal—or rather, as he liked to put it, borderline legal—company, the shady activities it covered that would doubtlessly end her political career if a reporter got hold of them; that his father had finally had it with the way his mother nags, because sure, he’d thought it was hot twenty years ago, but he is in fact an adult who can actually keep his shit together—all that he would have gotten.  He’d have been wrecked, but he’d have gotten it.

His dad leaving his mom for a nineteen-year-old gold-digger, though, and his mother not even putting up a fight—that had caught him by surprise.

That had _hurt_.

 _Be nice to her, Ben,_ his mother had said on the phone when he’d spoken to her for the first time in five years.  _She just lost your father._

_Yeah.  So did I._

❖

The roads are slippery the further north that he gets, covered with black ice in the dimming day as he rounds sharp curves.  The town hasn’t gotten to salting them yet, which simultaneously surprises and doesn’t surprise him at all.  But Ben’s Han Solo’s son and he learned how to coast across black ice before he’d learned his multiplication tables. 

He’d also learned that other drivers are idiots in the snow and ice and so when he passes a car that’s stuck in a snowbank, a slight smirk plays across his lips.  _Sucker_. 

But immediately, he slows his car down and parks it because if there’s one thing that his father had taught him, it’s that you always check on another car that looks to be in trouble. 

He grabs his coat from the second seat and tugs it on before getting out of the car, glancing at his cell phone before tucking it into his coat pocket to make sure he has service, just in case the driver’s hurt. 

He’d forgotten how cold it could get up here.  That sort of cold that bites at exposed skin, that dries out your face and your eyes, that freezes your hair even though it’s not wet.  He digs in his pocket for the leather gloves he wears in the city and tugs them onto his shaking hands as he shuffles through the snow towards the car.

It’s a little white sedan, old by the looks of it, and he can see even from a distance that the tires are so old they probably have no friction at all.  No wonder the driver spun out.

He knocks on the window of the backseat, the seat he can get to, and calls, “Hey—everyone ok in there?”

The car is on, and he sees whoever’s in the driver’s seat stiffen and sit up and then the rear window rolls down.  “You need help?”

“Sorry.”  The voice is watery and female and slightly accented. 

“You ok in there?” he asks.

“Yes, I’m—” and he hears her start to cry.

“You’re ok,” he tells her, quite at a loss of what else to say.  “You’re going to be ok.  Can you get out?”

She just keeps crying, though and Ben stands there, waiting for her to get her shit together.  He doesn’t have all day.  He’s got his father’s golddigging widow to confront.  The last thing he wants to do is explain that he was late because he was trying to do the right thing.

Actually, scratch that, that’s the perfect excuse to be late.

“Do you have a phone on you?  Is there someone you can call to let know you’re running late?”

“No,” she says wetly.  “I don’t.”

“Here,” Ben takes his phone out of his pocket and hands it to her. 

“There’s no service,” she replies when she takes it, and Ben sighs.  He forgot that his parents live in the boonies and they don’t have good cell towers out here.  If most people in the city still don’t have cell phones, people up in the mountains certainly aren’t creating demand for better cell reception.  His mom has a cell phone because a senator needs a cell phone, and his dad had a phone because it made smuggling easier, but they’d probably been two of exactly ten people in the state to take advantage of this development in technology.  In one of the few times his parents had tried to contact him after they’d settled their divorce, they’d sent those numbers along.  Ben had gone as far as to put them in his phone, but nothing more.  But no, he wouldn’t be shocked at all if the locals were slow to get cells up here.  The mountains, apparently, were screwing with the cell reception as much as the radio service.

“Come out of the car, and maybe it’ll clear up.  I had service when I got out of my car.”

“Hold on,” she says, and a moment later, he sees her wiggling her way through the gap between the two front seats until she’s in the second seat.  Then she’s climbing out of the car.

Ben’s first thought is that she’s very pretty, despite her red-from-tears eyes and nose.  She’s got hazel eyes, and brown hair she’s pulled back, oddly, into three little buns, and the sort of frown that makes him want to see her smile.  Her brow is creased as she walks along the roadside and Ben notices a few more things.  She’s tall—maybe five seven or five eight—and is wearing a coat that is much too big for her.  He sees a gold band on her left hand that can only be a wedding ring, so he assumes the coat belongs to her husband. 

“Aha,” she says a few feet away from him and he expects her to be calling her husband and is surprised when instead, she says, “Hello, I have an appointment with Dr. Kalonia at three pm.  Yes.  Johnson.  That’s me, hello.  I won’t be able to make it.  I had a car accident on the—yes I’m fine.  A bit shaken, but fine.  A snow bank, thank goodness, not a tree or another car.  No—no—it wasn’t—the roads are just very icy.  Anyway, I won’t be able to—yes.  Yes, well—no.  No actually that won’t work at all I’m—there’s some family things going on and—Yes, if that works for the doctor, that can work for me.  Yes, the number on file.  I’ll call to confirm when I get home.  Thanks so much.  Yes.  Yes, thank you,” and then, more wetly, because the tears have started again, “Thank you.” 

She hangs up the phone and turns back to Ben.  “Thank you,” she says, this time to him. 

“No problem,” he says.  “Glad you’re ok.  Hope the doctor’s appointment wasn’t—”

“What?  Oh.  Oh it’s fine.  It’s…” she shrugs.  “It’s fine.”

Ben looks around.  “Can I drop you anywhere?  I—” he pauses.  He is a hundred percent sure that Chewie has the equipment to get the car out of the snowbank.  Hell, Chewie could probably do it all by himself without any equipment at all.  “I know someone who can probably tow you out.”

“I do too,” she says.  “If—do you know the town?”

“Grew up here,” Ben says.

“Right—if you take me into Maz’s, I’ll be able to make some calls.  If it’s no trouble.”

“I’ll be passing through, so it’s absolutely no trouble,” Ben says.  So long as he doesn’t have to say hi to Maz.  He probably doesn’t have to get out of the car, though.  Yeah, he can just keep driving.

She follows him back to his car and gets into the passenger side.  “Do you have a purse—or anything you need from the car?” he asks her. 

She shakes her head.  “Pockets,” she says, patting the sides of her husband’s coat.  He nods, and turns the car on again.  “Do you mind if I turn on the seat heater?”

“Go for it,” Ben says and she does.

They drive in silence for a few minutes before she asks, “You in town to see your family?”

“Yeah,” he says. 

“That’s nice,” she replies.

“You lived here long?”

“The past few years.”

“Cool.  And before?”

“I’m originally from Jakku,” she replies.

“I was wondering where the accent came from.”

She smiles.  “Most people do.  I don’t think it’s a Jakku accent, though.  Just—a left up here.  It’s a bit faster.  They’re redoing the bridge.”

Ben takes the left, but she doesn’t continue with whatever it was she’d been planning on saying. 

Ben notices out of the corner of his eye that she’s wringing her hands in her lap. Her foot is jiggling back and forth with nerves and he decides that letting her sit in silence is probably the humane thing to do. 

It’s a relief, really, when he stops in front of Maz’s and she springs out of the car.  “Thanks so much,” she says again.

“Hope everything turns out ok,” he says.

“You too,” she replies distractedly, the way one says _you too_ when a sales clerk says _thanks for shopping with us_ and habit takes over because you thought they were going to say _have a nice day_.

Ben takes a deep breath and continues down the familiar road from Maz’s to his parents’ house.

❖

There’s no fanfare when he gets home.  There’s no anything.  He parks in the driveway in the empty spot by the woodshed and lets himself in the side door, kicking the snow off his boots as he does so.  “Hello?” he calls.

No one’s there.  Because of course not.  He’s just driving up from the city for the first time in years.  The house is empty, but when he makes his way through the kitchen, he sees a half-drunk cup of tea and a half-done crossword in his mother’s handwriting.

She probably went to the store or something nice and quick.  Ben tries not to be annoyed at that.

He grabs one of the cookies from the cookie jar—still stocked the way it has been ever since he’d been a kid, a testament to his mother’s sweet tooth.  Then he goes upstairs to the room that had been his to drop off his bag.

The bed is freshly made, and there’s a folded towel on it—as if Ben doesn’t know where his mother keeps her towels—as well as—

A lump forms in Ben’s throat.

His father’s dice, the ones he’d kept dangling off the rearview mirror of his car for as long as Ben could remember.  There’s a photograph somewhere in the house, or at least there had been, maybe his dad had taken it in the divorce, of Ben as a baby chewing on them with his gums and looking thoroughly delighted.  _They’re good luck, kid,_ his dad had told him when he’d been seven or eight, ruffling his hair.  _The reason your old man’s still alive._

A lump lodges in Ben’s throat, and his hand closes over the dice.  Carefully, he wraps the connecting chain around them and puts them in his pocket.

 _Ok.  Thanks mom,_ he admits to himself, sitting on his bed.

Oddly, he doesn’t feel angry.  He hasn’t since he stopped by the roadside to help that woman.  It’s like it’s burned itself away.  He feels empty.  Quiet. 

He flops back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.  He knows himself well enough to know that the empty quiet calm feeling isn’t going to last.  But at least he can take advantage of it to rest for a little bit until his mom gets back.

And get back she does, about fifteen minutes later.  He hears her voice downstairs, low and in conversation with someone. Then she calls, “Ben?  You here?”

“Yeah,” he replies, lugging himself off the bed and glancing at himself in the mirror.  He looks a bit haggard.  His hair is too long—his mother will comment on it—and there are dark circles under his eyes.  His five o’clock shadow is coming in, too, but he cares less about that than the dark circles. 

He sighs and heads out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“Chewie’ll have it fixed in no time,” he hears his mom say. 

“I’ll need to borrow yours for my appointment, though, probably.”  And Ben stops dead in his tracks at just the moment that he rounds the door into the kitchen because he recognizes that voice.  It’s the girl he’d picked up on the roadside.  Her back is to him, and she’s wringing her hands again while his mother bustles around the kitchen, clearly trying to get her a cup of tea.  His mother smiles the moment she sees Ben—a tight smile, a cautious smile.

“Hello, you.”  Her voice is soft.  He doesn’t remember his mother ever speaking softly in her life.

“Hi,” he replies, and his eyes dart to the back of the younger woman’s head, and he sees that she’s stiffened too, that she’s taking a deep breath before glancing over her shoulder.

“It’s good to see you,” his mother continues and Ben, for the life of him, can’t tell if she’s noticed the way he and the other woman are eying one another at all, or if she’s doing that thing where she’s too subtle for words.  She settles the mug on the counter in front of the woman, who reaches for it unconsciously, and crosses to where Ben’s standing, stopping just short of him and looking him up and down.  “I’ve missed you.”

Ben looks down at her.  Her hair’s greyer, her face is more wrinkled, but her makeup’s as pristine as it ever is and her eyes are the same. 

And dad’s dead.

“I missed you too,” he manages stiffly.

“Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you got in—would you like some tea?” she waves a hand back to the tea kettle.  “I’m making some for Rey.  She got into a car accident.  That black ice over on Route Eleven’s really been bad this—”

Ben’s head snaps to look at— _Rey_ —so quickly that his neck ends up cracking staring at her.

She’s still wearing—would that be his dad’s coat, then?  But she’s _taller_ than his dad and the coat’s long on her—whose is it?  And as she fidgets with her hands, she’s twisting the wedding ring that—

“Ben,” his mother intones warningly, and Ben rounds on her, his nostrils flaring. 

“She’s _here_?”

“Of course she’s here,” his mother snaps.  “Why wouldn’t she be here?”

“Why _would_ she be here?” he snarls.  “Why doesn’t she—”

“She’s here.  Be nice.  She’s just been in a car accident.”

“I know that,” he snaps.  “I picked her up from—” and he stops talking.  He’s looking at her again and she’s looking at him and it’s like she’s raised every defense she’s ever had as she stares at him.  Her jaw is stiff, as though she’s preparing for war.  So different from when she’d been crying in the car.  He takes a deep breath.

He is _not_ going to say _hi_ to the gold-digger who broke up his parents’ marriage.

He is not going to. 

But he can at least not say anything, which is probably better than saying any number of the words coming through his head.

He shoulders past his mom, and pours himself a cup of tea then sits by the counter, angling his body away from her.

“Oh for crying out loud, Ben,” his mother mutters under her breath.  “There’s no need to be fifteen all over again.”

“It’s fine,” Rey says suddenly, getting to her feet.  “I’ll let you two—”

“You do _not_ have to absent yourself because my son is being a petulant child.”

“I am not being a petulant child,” Ben grouses, fully aware that he sounds exactly like a petulant child.

“No—you haven’t spoken in five years.  I’ll give you your privacy.  I could also lie down.  It’s been stressful.”

She makes her way to the kitchen doorway, but Leia calls out, “Take your tea with you,” and she turns and gives his mother a smile that’s sort of—

— _No don’t think like that_ , he berates himself.  He is _not_ going to think of her smile as pretty, or charming, or transformative.  That’s probably the smile she used to seduce his _father_. 

And just like that, she’s gone, and he’s alone with his mother, the way he should have been, the way he’s supposed to be.  There shouldn’t be _Rey_ at all. 

“What’s she _doing_ here?” he asks.  “Why isn’t she—I don’t know.  Somewhere else.”

“Because she’s here, Ben.  Because she’s here.  And she’s _been_ here, which is more than I can say for you.”

“Oh come on, as if her being here isn’t the reason that—”

“That my fully-grown son doesn’t understand that his parents are fully-grown adults, capable of their own decision making?” Leia demands and gone is the soft voice she’d greeted him with, or the tentative expression.  She’s Leia Organa again, exactly the way he remembers.  “Honestly, Ben.  You act like it happened to spite you.”

“No, it didn’t happen to spite me,” he snorts.  “But I don’t suppose I was considered at all.”

“As you spent most of your teenaged years reminding us, you aren’t a child anymore.  And if you’d actually talked to us instead of throwing a plate through the window and driving off and never coming home, maybe we could have—”

“Fine.  Fine.  I get it,” Ben snaps.

“Do you?” Leia retorts hotly.  “Because honest to god, Ben, sometimes I think your head is so far up your ass that—”

“Welcome fucking home,” Ben spits at her, turning on his heel.

“Oh don’t you dare,” Leia retorts.  “Don’t you _dare!_   Your father just died and then you come back here and have the _gall_ to—”

Yeah, this is home. 

Home is storming out of the kitchen midway through a fight with his mother because he’s trembling with rage and he doesn’t want to break anything, hurt anyone, which he will if he stays put one second longer.  Home is taking to the stairs at a run and slamming the door to his bedroom so hard that it shakes the whole house.

And home is also thirty minutes later when his mother comes into his room with a fresh cup of tea because she knows that he can’t sustain a rage that powerful for that long.

“Ben?” she asks him as she settles on the bed next to him.

“I just don’t get it,” he mutters. 

“Well maybe if you did pull your head out of your ass for—”

“I get it.  I’m a dumbass,” he grumbles.  Then he sighs and looks up at his mom.  “He loved her?”

A strange look crosses his mother’s face.  Not painful.  Not even wistful.  Barely even sad.  If anything she looks relieved.  “He did,” she says.  “And he’d want you to as well, I think.”

“Nice try,” Ben mutters. 

“Can you at least try to be civil?  She’s not a bad person.”

“Why don’t you _hate_ her?  She broke up your marriage.”

“Because there are more important things to care about,” his mother replies.  “And I’m too old to care about some things.  She’s a good person.  A nice person.  And she’s torn up about your father, so maybe you can provide some—”

“If you say comfort to the grieving widow, I swear to _god_ , mom.  He was my father.”

“That’s not an innuendo.”  His mother looks disgusted.

“It is around the people I work with.” 

And her lips purse.  “You’re still at—”

“Yes,” he replies.

“And what is it you’re doing with them now?”

“I’m still Snoke’s exec.”

He hears his mother inhale slowly.  He knows she’s counting to ten because he counts, internally, with her.

“Ben, you need to quit that job,” she says at the same time he says, “Don’t say it.  Just don’t fucking say it.”

“It’s a _dead end_ you’re so much more than—” she continues as he says, “It’s a good job.  I’ve grown so much and he trusts me with—”

“You have so much potential don’t you see that you’re wasting away there.”

“I’m trusted, and he’s going to put me in a position when he finds the right fit for my skills.”

“And what, pray, does that mean?  You’ve been his EA for six years, Ben.  It’s time to do something else.”

“Look, can we not talk about this now?” he grumbles.

“What would you prefer? Talking about how you hate Rey, how I haven’t talked to you in five years, or how the second you come home it’s like nothing’s different.”

“Everything’s different,” Ben grunts.  _Dad’s gone._

He doesn’t say that part aloud.  He doesn’t need to.

His mother just sighs and strokes his back. 

“Be nice to her,” Leia says.  “Please.  You were nice to her on the roadside.  She said so.”

Yeah.  Yeah, he had been.  When he’d thought she was just some local who’d gotten herself into a bit of trouble.  Kind of cute, but married, and stressed about missing a doctor’s appointment.

He thinks of his father.  He thinks of the night his father told him that he and mom were getting divorced, that he was marrying some girl— _girl_ , barely legal—that Ben had never heard of, much less met.

His hand tightens on the bedspread.

He’s not going to lie to his mom.

But he’s also not sure he can bring himself to be nice to home-wrecking, gold-digging Rey.

❖

Ben comes down from his bedroom an hour later to find Rey in the kitchen, helping his mother with dinner.  “Chewie says it should be ready the day after tomorrow.”

“That’ll be after my appointment.”

“One of us will drive you.”

“It’s quite early in the—”

“I’ll make Ben do it if I’m not awake.  Don’t worry about it.  We’ll make sure you get there.”

Ben clears his throat and both of them look up from the island where they’re chopping root vegetables. 

“Hello,” he says carefully, his eyes on his mother. 

“If you want to make yourself useful, you can set the table,” his mother says without missing a beat.  He nods and he goes to the cabinet and gets out three plates and three glasses.

“Four, please,” his mother comments when she sees what he has loaded in his arms.

“Four?” Ben asks.  “Is Chewie—”

“Luke,” Leia says and Ben takes another deep breath. 

He shouldn’t be surprised.  He really shouldn’t be surprised.  But the last person he wants to see right now is his uncle. 

He hasn’t seen Uncle Luke in six years, had stopped talking to him a year before he’d stopped talking to his parents. If his mother hated him working for First Order, Uncle Luke hated him _because_ he worked for the First Order.  _I still think you’re wrong to drop out of law school—it’s an impulsive decision, Ben, and you’re better than that.  But they’re evil.  Pure, unadulterated evil._

_Guess I’m evil then too, you fucking hypocrite._

He notices that Rey doesn’t look happy about it either.  How ironic would it be if he and Uncle Luke bonded over a mutual distaste for her?  Because he can’t fathom that Uncle Luke would be thrilled that Rey had split up the marriage of his best friend and his sister—a relationship he had helped craft to begin with.

“Is he staying here too?” Ben asks, trying to be polite.

His mother barks out a laugh.  “And put him under the same roof as you?  You’ve grown a sense of humor.  No—he’s staying at Chewie and Maz’s.”

Ben can’t help but be a little relieved at that.  Rey, also, looks relieved.  _What’s her deal with Luke,_ he wonders before deciding he doesn’t want to go there.  What happens if she has a good reason for disliking his uncle and then—worse than him bonding with Uncle Luke over their mutual dislike of Rey—he bonds with _Rey_ over their mutual dislike of Luke?

Ben sets the table for four, putting out the plates his dad liked best and pouring himself some wine to start off with.  He’s about halfway through the glass when the kitchen phone rings.  His mother answers it at once.  “Hello?”  And then a sigh.  “Does this have to be right now?”  Then an eyeroll.  “One moment, let me go into the study.”  She places the phone on the kitchen counter.  “Hang this up when I’m on the line,” she tells Rey and then she’s gone and just like that, Ben and Rey are alone in the kitchen together.

Ben takes a sip of wine and looks at Rey.  _Be nice to her,_ plays in the back of his head in his mother’s voice.  But for some reason, the only thought he can really think of right now is how long has she been staying here?  Doesn’t she have her own house to be in—wherever she and his dad had moved to? 

He doesn’t want to think about that.  He doesn’t want to think about his father anywhere but here, home, with his mom, but if he thinks about why Rey’s here, he has to acknowledge that that wasn’t the way he’d lived when he’d died.  That wasn’t the way he’d lived for a long time—longer than the five years he’d been married to Rey, probably, because they’d had to have—there had been a time when—did she visit while his parents were still together?  Did she fuck his dad in this kitchen?

He takes another sip of wine.

“Do you want wine?” he asks her at last.  Because everything’s a little bit easier when you’re drunk.  And she doesn’t exactly look comfortable.  _See, mom?  I’m being nice.  Thinking about her comfort and everything._

“I don’t drink, but thank you,” Rey says quietly. 

“You don’t drink?” He finds that surprising.  He can’t imagine his dad being with anyone who wouldn’t drink whiskey with him.  Hell, he’d half-imagined his dad getting her booze illegally while she’d been underage.  Seems like something he’d do.  It would make sense as a way that he’d have met her.

“Bad associations,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.  “My parents drank, and it was enough to make me never want to touch the stuff.”

“Oh,” Ben says because he can’t think of what else to say.  He raises the wine to his lips again.  “Ok then.”

He can hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the entry way.  Rey examines her fingernails.  He finishes his wine and pours himself another glass.

“Are they coming to the funeral?” he asks at last.

“Who?”

“Your parents.” 

Rey blinks at him as though surprised.  “No,” she says.  “I haven’t—they don’t—” She takes a deep breath and looks away from him.  “I don’t have parents.”

“Oh,” Ben says, feeling a bit like a dick for half-hoping that her parents weren’t coming because they disapproved of her relationship with his father.  “Sorry.”  _Maybe she was looking for parents in dad.  That was why she liked him or something—because he_ was _old enough to be her father._

She shrugs.  “I don’t remember much of them.”   _Just that they drank a lot._ Ben suppresses the sympathy rising in his chest.

“So you grew up in foster care?” he asks her.

“Yes.  A truly delightful system,” she replies dryly. 

“Not placed in good homes?”

“Not as such.”

“How’d you end up in this neck of the woods?” he asks, and immediately wants to kick himself.  He doesn’t want to know how she met his father.  Not even a little bit.  But that could be the sort of question that ends in _and that’s how I met your dad._

“It was a mistake, really,” she says with a half-smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.  “A friend of mine—Finn—he and I got sort of off track on a road trip, and had car trouble and that’s how I met your dad.”  Ben’s hand tightens on the wine glass and he takes a sip. 

Mercifully, Rey doesn’t continue.  She probably senses that she’s pushing her luck, especially after the display earlier.

Which his mother would want him to apologize for.  _Be polite, Ben._

But she’s not in the room, and he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to—at least when he’s off the clock.

Rey’s face shifts, and the tentativeness that’s been there the whole time fades and is replaced by something so very different from the crying girl he’d picked up on the roadside earlier that day.  “What’s your problem?” she demands angrily.  “I mean—I can guess some of it, but what’s your problem?  You had a father who loved you and you just—”

“Drop it,” he barks. 

“Did you hate him?  Is that why you stopped calling?”

“I didn’t hate him,” Ben says, blindsided by the question so soon after the _I can guess some of it._

“So you hating me mattered more than you loving him.  Or is it something I’m not supposed to understand because I don’t have parents?”

Her arms are crossed over her chest, her nostrils are flared, there’s an angry flush to his cheeks and for some reason, it’s in that exact moment that he notices she’s wearing an old sweater of his mother’s. 

Before he can think to say anything, he hears the doorbell ring.  Both he and Rey turn to open it, clearly wanting out of this situation as much as they can.  Ben’s closer to the front door, though, and also has longer legs, so he leaves her behind him.

And regrets it immediately upon opening the door.

His uncle’s hair is grayer, his beard is longer, his face is more lined, and he’s just as short as Ben remembers him.  There’s surprise on his face that Ben would be the one answering the door—especially since Ben hasn’t said hello yet.

Though neither has his uncle.

Let _him_ be the bigger person, since that’s what he always needs to be.

But Uncle Luke doesn’t say anything at all.

“Mom’s on the phone,” Ben says at last, stepping out of the way.  His uncle kicks snow off his boots and comes inside, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it on the coatrack just by the door.

“When’d you get in?” he asks.

“This afternoon.”

Luke grunts and without another word makes his way towards the study where Leia is still on the phone, undoubtedly to hover until she removes herself from the call.  Ben catches a glimpse of Rey hovering in the doorway.  _She hasn’t said hi to him either._

Ben goes back into the kitchen and makes a point of checking the stew his mother had been making before she and Luke come back into the kitchen.

“The roads were icy,” Luke’s saying. 

“Rey had a car accident earlier today,” Leia says.  “Ben found her and made sure she got home to safety.”

Ben shoots his mother a dirty look.  She shoots him one right back.

“You weren’t hurt?” Luke asks Rey, his voice a little clipped but clearly endeavoring to be civil.

“Just shaken,” she shrugs, glancing at Leia and Ben’s surprised to see a _what are you playing at_ sort of look on Rey’s face as well.

“Well, that’s good,” Luke says.

“Chewie’s got her car now,” Leia tells him.

“Oh so that’s the rig he towed in.”

“Yes,” she nods, “and says he’ll work on getting it fixed up in a jiffy.  The engine’s fine, but the suspension got a little dinged up.” Leia points to the table and they collect plates, bringing them to the pot and letting her scoop stew into each one.  Then they settle around the kitchen table.  Ben pours himself a third glass of wine, and offers some to his mother, who passes, and Luke, who does not.

They eat silently.

Ben can still hear the ticking of the grandfather clock.

He’s glad he’s not sober, especially when Luke lifts his wineglass and says, “I’d just like to propose a toast to Han.  He was my best friend, my brother, and I can’t believe he’s gone.”

Ben’s gaze is a little hazy, a little unfocused, but there’s something in Luke’s expression that makes him almost pity his uncle.  Almost.

“To Han,” Leia agrees, lifting her glass of water.  Rey does the same.  All of them drink deeply.

“Have people been in touch?” Luke asks Leia again.

“Most of Han’s associates aren’t the type to drive up to the middle of nowhere for a funeral.  Which is fine by me.  I have a few friends coming up, but that’s it.  He’d want it to be small.  He always did like to…to fly under the radar.”

And there’s something in his mother’s voice that makes Ben’s heart twist a bit too.  She looks grief stricken.  _Were you over him?_ he wonders.  Because sure, she seems to get on ok with Dad’s gold-digging widow, but that’s the voice of someone who is deeply in mourning over the person she loved, a partner of more than thirty years.

Under the table, Ben reaches for his mother’s hand.  She squeezes him, and gives him a soft smile.  “I’m glad everyone at this table is here right now,” she says.  “I know you all have your…well, you have your whatever.  But I’m glad you’re here.  Han would be glad you’re here.”

Ben casts a glance at his uncle, who is staring at his spoon of stew as he brings it to his lips, then at Rey who looks like she’s about to cry.  _And no one but mom to comfort her._

Ben should revel in that, but he’ll blame the alcohol on the fact that he doesn’t.  In fact, he almost pities her.

The rest of dinner mostly consists of his mother and Luke talking—mostly about judicial oversight and one of the cases he judged that is going up to the Supreme Court in a month and a half, and reminding Ben horribly of that summer he’d interned for him.  It’s energetic, almost humorous, and it’s so very obviously an attempt not to think about Dad, Rey, Ben, whatever’s causing whichever of them the most angst at any given moment.  His mother has compartmentalization down to an art form, she could teach a masterclass in it.  Ben’s never seen her succumb to any sort of pain or hardship before—not even when she and dad got divorced.  To hear Uncle Luke tell it, she’d kept rolling just as smoothly after her parents had died.  She keeps her grief to herself when she feels it.  Sometimes, Ben wonders if she lets herself feel it at all.

It’s as Rey is helping collect the dirty dishes that Luke says, “When do we want to go over it?”

“Go over what?” Leia asks.

“Han’s will.  How long is Ben in town?”

“Ben is sitting right here and you can ask him,” Ben snarks at his uncle.  Luke doesn’t even look at him.  His eyes are still on Leia.

“I’m not sure Han had a will,” she says slowly, glancing for the first time at Rey.

“He had one,” Luke says, his face going dark and Ben’s got a bad feeling about this.

Luke gets to his feet and goes out to the hallway.  Ben hears the sound of his briefcase opening and he glances at his mother, who looks positively stricken.  Luke comes back into the room holding a piece of paper, and he reads, “If you find my corpse in a sewer somewhere, all of my worldly possessions go to my wife.”

And that’s when Ben’s grip on the wineglass goes so tight that it shatters the thing.  Wine and glass shards fly everywhere and his mother yells “ _Ben—don’t,_ ” but he’s staring at her.

That’s his will?

His _wife_ , not Leia Organa.  His _wife._

Because why would Han Solo—whose very MO in everything he does is shirking responsibility, pleading _it’s not my fault_ —make anything more substantial than _this_ his last will and testament?

“This was before you were born,” Luke tells Ben, grimacing as he sits back down.  “He was heading out of town, and I pointed out that if he died, we wouldn’t know what to do with his stuff.  How was he supposed to keep Lando’s paws off his car without some sort of legal documentation?  So he wrote this as a joke.”  His voice softens, an old fondness, “Said he’d even go so far as to drop it off with the county clerk to make it official.”  Ben’s eyes are on his mother, whose eyes are bright, and whose face is derisive.  Then he turns his attention to Rey.

Rey looks like she might laugh and like she might cry, a fond mourning on her face.  She, like everyone at the table, can imagine Han Solo’s lips curling in a smile as he’d dropped this off with the county clerk before going off to do god knows what.  She, like everyone else, can see him feeling so very pleased with himself that he’d gotten a one-up on Lando who wanted his car and Luke who wanted him to be a little bit responsible, and Leia, who might one day tell him to write a will, but _oh darling, I have one filed with the state already, and you get all my stuff._  

 _She just lost your father, Ben._ He sees that on her face, as her gaze drops down to her hands, as the warmth at Han’s unthinking actions fade and leave her with nothing more than his ghost.

“So she gets everything, then?” Ben asks.

“It’s been filed with the clerk,” Luke says, coolly, ever with that judicial temperament, that detached _let’s look at the law and see what it says,_ that holier than thou, do as I say do as I do that had made Ben want to put his fist through a window.  “It’s the request on record.  The only way that it wouldn’t be the case is if—“

“I sue,” Ben says and he’s glaring at his uncle with every ounce of venom in his body.

Luke nods.  “The will was written before you were born.  I’m sure you could make a case that your father would have left you some of his worldly possessions or financial estate had he updated it.”

“So I guess we’re going to court,” Ben growls.

“We’re not going to court,” his mother interjects and Ben rounds on her.

“Oh?  Aren’t we?  You want her to get everything of dad’s?  I have got one hell of a case to sue if it was written before I was fucking born.”

“I think that going to court will mean a lot of time and money and that between the three of us we might be able to reach an agreement.”

Ben stares at Rey.  Rey stares back at him.  She looks a little bit dazed but those defenses he’d seen earlier are back up and he can tell she’s waiting for whatever it is he’s going to say.

“It might be a good idea for you to retain counsel all the same,” Luke says.  “In case it gets heated.”

And Ben’s gaze snaps to his uncle, leaving Rey.  “Why, because you think I can’t have a level-headed discussion?” he snarls.

“Ben,” his mother intones, reaching for his arm.

“Because you seem so very in control of yourself right now,” Luke replies evenly.

“ _Luke_ ,” his mother berates.

“I’m sure once the shock has worn off, we’ll be able to talk things through,” Rey chimes in and Ben’s about to shout _oh shut up, you’ve done enough_ at her but—“Especially because I don’t want any of it.”

And that’s when the room goes silent—except that it doesn’t, because Ben’s laughing.  Right.  That’s his laughter filling the room.  “You don’t want it?” he laughs at her.  “That’s a good one.”

“Ben, knock it off,” his mother snaps. 

“I don’t,” Rey says, and the way she blazes at him when she says it, the way her eyes flare defiantly, as though daring him to debate the matter.  He’d spent how many years of his life imagining his father’s new wife to be a gold-digger but here she is, claiming, “It’s not my money.  It was never my money.”

What is she playing at?  She’s looking at him now as though waiting for him to explode.  Except—no, she isn’t.  She’s looking at him tentatively, hopefully.  What has she got to be hopeful about?  That he was kind to her when he didn’t know who she was?

“Ordinarily, in situations like this, the next of kin would oversee any negotiations regarding adjustments to the will, barring, of course, anyone suing and it going to the courts,” Luke tells Rey, not looking at Ben, who is grinding his teeth.

“Well, it’s a good thing he’s here then,” she says, her eyes not leaving Ben.

It takes them a moment to realize what she’s implying.  Then, Ben grits out.  “I’m not his next of kin.  You’re his wife.  You’re it, baby.”  But immediately after he’s said it, he wishes he hadn’t.  God, why can he never fucking keep his tongue between his teeth?  Because there’s something truly horrible, watching the way that Rey’s determined, defiant eyes go blank and her face fall.  He shouldn’t care that her face is falling.  Hell, he should be calling a lawyer right now.  But instead, he’s feeling as though his chest is getting tight as she says,

“I—what?”

“You married him.  You’re his next of kin.  I’m after you.” 

“Oh,” she says.  Then she blinks.  She blinks a lot, as though trying not to cry.  Why would she be trying not to cry over this?  She’d _married_ him, surely she would have thought that this might happen.  “Well, then—we’ll definitely—“

“Rey, sweetheart,” his mother cuts in, “you’re in as much shock as the rest of us.  Let’s talk about all this tomorrow and leave it here for the night.”

“Tomorrow’s the funeral,” Luke says.  “I don’t think anyone is going to be in a place to have a cogent discussion tomorrow.  And I do think that everyone in the room should retain counsel.”

“Let’s try without shelling out to a group of lawyers,” Leia says.  “I’m sure we can come up with an amicable solution.”

“I don’t want it,” Rey repeats at once.  “I didn’t—I don’t—”

Leia cuts Ben off before he can say anything.  “Rey, don’t say something you’ll regret.  Honestly, the pair of you are so impulsive.  Let’s cool down and talk about this like rational adults.  I’m ending this conversation now.”  She glares at her brother as though it’s his fault that Han Solo had gone and filed this “will” with the county clerk, or maybe—more likely—for starting this conversation.

Ben lugs himself to his feet.  The sink is full of dishes and pans and he goes to clean them up.  His head does that thing where you realize you’re drunker than you thought you were because you stood up.  But someone’s gotta do the dishes and that’s what his dad always did.  _Come on, little man, we’re gonna get our hands dirty._

No one offers to help him as he scrubs the bowls clean of initial food waste and then puts them into the dishwasher.  By the time he’s done, the kitchen is empty, Luke has driven off back to Chewie and Maz’s and he can hear his mother and Rey talking quietly in the living room.

“It feels wrong,” Rey is saying.

“I know, sweetheart, but the last thing we want is for you to be hung out high and dry after all this.”

Because of course his mother is siding with her.  She split up her marriage, but his mother—

—has a bigger heart than he does.  That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it?  Selfish, loud, angry Ben.

He doesn’t go into the living room—he goes straight up the stairs to his bedroom and throws himself onto the bed and hopes to fuck he’ll fall asleep fast.

❖

The terrible thing about sleep is that when you want to fall asleep—desperately need to—sleep never comes.

Ben’s known this for years.  He’s never slept well in his life.  Maybe once when he was sick, but usually, he tosses and turns.  He thinks beds aren’t made for someone as tall as him.  Unless he curls up, his feet end up pushing off the mattress, and when he curls up it makes his back hurt.

At about two thirty in the morning, he goes downstairs to get a cup of water.  He takes his phone with him.  It’s one of those new phones with your email on it, and when he checks his work email, he sees over six hundred messages that he’s been cc’d on.  He hopes to fuck that Snoke had copied Hux on replies, or that the auto reply he’d set up hastily at the end of the day before means that whoever’s in touch with him knows who to include moving forward.

Ben can’t remember the last time he had a week off. 

Hux made it sound like the whole planet was going to explode.

Ben found he couldn’t care.

His dad was dead.

He was home for the first time in years.

He stops dead in his tracks when he reaches the kitchen.  The light is on and Rey is sitting at the counter, a pencil in her hand.  For a second, he thinks she’s doing a crossword until he realizes that the boxes aren’t blacked out in any way.  She has a phone pressed to her ear and is murmuring into it. 

“I’m not going to take it and run.”  She sounds like she’s rolling her eyes.  “I know you were joking, but all the same.  That would hardly be fair after the kindness they’ve—” she pauses, then sighs.  “No, it’s not fair to Ben.”

Ben frowns.  Why would she care what’s fair to Ben?  _Clearly not part of the fucking family._

“Pretty much what you’d expect,” she’s saying.  “He’s angry, and I feel like shit and—no.  No, not because—he didn’t do or say anything that I haven’t—“ she cuts herself off because whoever she’s talking to seems to be saying a lot.  A whole lot.  She tries to talk again.  “Finn.  Look, can’t I just be tired?  I don’t want to make things worse than I already have and I _did_ make things worse by—” she lets out an annoyed growl.  “Yes, I agree.  Yes, he—Han and Leia _tried_ to—” She sounds so very tired.  Her voice is dry and raw and it crackles a bit as she tries to speak.

“Look, I hear you,” she says.  “Can you let me get through the funeral, please?  Before you start aggressively start standing up for me?  Which you don’t need to do because I can stand up for myself, thank you very—oh stop it, I am _not_ putting on a brave face.  I just want to be able to get through the next few days without screaming.  My neck is hurting from that car crash and I haven’t slept well for a week and Han just died.”

She rubs her hand against her neck, massaging the muscles there.  “He was very nice when I first met him, but he didn’t know it was me.  I told you that.”  There’s a pause, during which Ben can only imagine a _no, you didn’t tell me that, what are you talking about_ , because she says, “He was the one who picked me up by the road and took me to Maz’s.  He was very kind.  It was only when I got back and he—” She lets out another annoyed sound.  “What do you want me to say?  That I hate him for hating his father?”

 _I told her I didn’t,_ Ben protests silently, seething at whoever she’s on the phone with, seething at her for being on the phone at all, for being in this house, in his life. 

“Because that dinner was painful but it wasn’t because of _him_ ,” she says significantly.  “And if he’s the least of my demons right now, then I don’t have the energy to hate him.  I don’t.  Not when I know he can be kind, even if he doesn’t want to be to me.”

Ben blinks.

He hadn’t been expecting that.  Not at all.  He’d been expecting her to shred him on the phone to her friend, to be what everyone in his family always is—disappointed in him to the last.  He’s never been the least of anyone’s demons.  He wonders what she’d meant by that.

“It’s late,” Rey says after a moment’s pause.  “No—I’m doing some Sudoku right now.  I couldn’t get my head to calm down after dinner.  Oh, I’m sure she did and she didn’t want to worry me.  I’m not a child, as everyone seems to keep forgetting.  I can, in fact, handle complicated situations and information.”  She snorts into the phone and sighs and Ben flares that she’d speak about his mother that way.  “That’s not fair,” she says and it sounds like she’s saying it more to herself than to Finn.  “No, she’s been—she hasn’t been herself at all.  I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”  She sighs.  “I should try to sleep at least a little.  Tomorrow’s going to be…”  Her voice trails away.  Then she says, “Yes.  You too.  Goodnight.”  And she places the phone back in the cradle. 

She sighs, stretches her arms up over her head with a yawn and shakes her head slightly.  She looks down at her magazine puzzle again before putting the pencil down on the counter. 

“Hi,” Ben says because he doesn’t know what else to say.  She looks up, startled.  Had she been so engrossed that she hadn’t realized that he was coming downstairs?  The house is old, the wooden floorboards creak and he has all the grace of an elephant.  She must have heard him. 

“Hi,” she says quietly. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” Ben says.

“Yeah, me neither,” she replies.  There are dark circles under her eyes.  She looks as tired as she’d sounded, as she’d asserted, on that phone call.

He reaches up to the cabinet above the sink and takes down one of his mother’s old glasses.  Then he fills it and takes a sip.  Then another.

He finishes the glass and refills it, then without another word, he makes his way back towards the hallway.

“Ben?” Rey asks.  Her voice is quiet, but the whole house is silent that it’s almost like she’d screamed his name at him.

He pauses and looks back.  “Yeah?”

“I mean it—I don’t want it.  It should be yours.”  Ben’s stares at her.  “Can you believe that?  I know you don’t know me very well, but…”

Ben takes a sip of his water.  No, he doesn’t know her very well.  He doesn’t want to know her very well.  But she’d just defended him on the phone to a friend, and now seems determined that he think well of her. 

“Why do you care what I think of you?” he asks her, and she inhales sharply. 

“Because I’ve never been what you thought I was.  This has never been what it looks like.”

“Oh yeah?” Ben asks her.  “So you’re saying that you did love him?  So much you want nothing to remember him by?”

She looks down at the puzzle she’d been working on.  There are numbers, scratched and erased, in little boxes.  He’s seen them in the magazines lately, not that he’s ever really had time to do them.  Once, almost, during a delay at an airport, but in the end he’d had a long conversation with Snoke about his future.

A conversation that had led to nothing.

That’s where all his conversations go, don’t they?  Nowhere and nothingness.  Luke and his internship.  His mom and _you could be so much, Ben._ Snoke and promises of just the right team to lead, when you’re ready, when you’ve learned enough.

And now Rey, who’s going to inherit all his dad’s…it’s not even about the fucking money.

It’s about everything else, the pieces of Han Solo that are all Ben has left.  His hand tightens on the water glass.

“Yeah,” he says bitterly, too tired to fight.  “Sure.  Ok.”

“It’s the truth,” she blazes at him and for a moment, he is too lost in the blazing glory of her dimly-lit face—just how much she seems to _glow_ from how intense she is as she looks at him—that he forgets what he’s even bitter and tired about.

_Dad always did like spitfires._

There.  That’s what he’s mad about.

Except, oddly, he’s not.  Because…

“Why is mom here?” he asks.  “Or why are you?  Whichever?”

“What?” Rey asks quickly, nervously. 

“Why aren’t you staying wherever dad moved to, or why isn’t she…wherever she moved to?”

“We’re close,” Rey says a little sheepishly.

“Yeah, but—never mind.”  He doesn’t need her to keep looking at him like that, like he pathetically doesn’t understand what it’s like to have a happy relationship with his own mother.  “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Ben,” Rey whispers after him. 

And the strangest sensation creeps into his skin, into his heart and body.  It’s oddly sweet, the way she intones it, as though it’s a gentle caress to his face.  He—he—

He feels his heart swell?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends--I made a short [spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1XNq99pjkFGiWsfmtOaMdz?si=F7779ORhQcyzOhOF6oV_Lg) that I think captures the vibe of this fic! Enjoy!

Ben doesn’t sleep much, but he knows he sleeps because he wakes to a gentle knock on his door.

“Ben, sweetheart, do you want to shower before we go?”

It takes him a moment to remember where he is, what he’s doing here.

Right.

Dad’s funeral.  He’s back in his old bed.

“Thanks,” he calls, unsure if his mother’s still outside the door.  She can move so quietly.

“There’ll be coffee downstairs for you,” Leia tells him.

He sits up, and rubs his face, his eyes landing on the mirror by his old dresser.  He looks like he hasn’t slept.  He looks like he drank last night.  His hair’s a mess, and his five o’clock shadow is scruffy and patchy.  He’d never been able to grow an even beard.  Uncle Luke had once joked that it had only happened after law school for him, but dad had replied that it had never happened for him.  _That’s why your old man never grows a beard,_ he’d said, a dumb joke to try and make Ben smile.  _Too crooked to grow one._

Ben doesn’t care much.  He doesn’t really want a beard.  But he does look shabby right now.

Yeah, a shower would be a good call.

So he gets up, grabs his towel and makes his way to the bathroom where he takes a short shower and begins to shave.  The house is quiet—which is how he hears the conversation across the hall.

“I don’t have anything that fits.”

“What about this one.”

“The skirt’s far too short.”

“Oh, but it looks lovely on you, dear.  And it is black.”

“No—seriously, I tried it.  The skirt is—”

“Tights?  Leggings?”

“It’s a funeral.”

“If you wear your boots—the tall ones—it’ll probably take away from—”

“Those aren’t indoor boots, though.  I can’t wear those around the lunch at Chewie’s.”

He hears a heavy sigh, hears footsteps, then hears his mother say, “Listen—I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think it is.  No one will care anyway.”

“Ow—fuck!” Ben yelps.

Because he’s cut himself, right across the cheek.  He hasn’t cut himself shaving with a flat razor since he was like fourteen.  “Ben?” his mother calls.

“I’m fine,” he replies.  Blood is gushing down the side of his face.  The cut is narrow, but even the lightest cut to the face bleeds intensely.  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, tugging at the roll of toilet paper hanging on the wall by the sink and dabbing it onto his face, pressing the cut as hard as he can while he rifles through the medicine cabinet.  “Do we have band-aids?”

“Downstairs,” his mother replies.

Ben looks down at himself.  He’s naked—hadn’t bothered wrapping the towel around his waist when he’d gotten out of the shower. 

“I can—” he hears Rey say, then hears light footsteps on the stairs.  One handed, he fumbles for the towel, doing his best to wrap it around his waist.  All too soon, Rey’s coming back up the stairs and knocking on the bathroom door and pushing in right as he says, “Just a second.”

To be fair, he did have his towel around his waist when she’d come into the bathroom. 

The problem was it wasn’t a very good grip and yes—yes, that little black dress—is that his _mother’s_ little black dress?  He’s definitely seen her wearing it in photographs—is far too short and Rey’s got legs for days so his grip might have slipped a little bit. 

“Oh goodness,” Rey says stumbling back.  He’s staring at her legs—long and strong—and he’s quite sure that she’s seen his dick and his brain sort of shorts out which is probably the only reason he doesn’t flip a shit in his humiliation.  “I’ll just—” and she fucking throws the box of bactaids at him as she flees, slamming the door behind her.

Ben groans and sits the fuck down on the floor.

Great.

Just great.

 _Doesn’t she have clothes of her own?_ Why was she wearing _his mother’s_ dress?  And his mother’s sweater the night before, too?

Something weird is going on.

But it’ll have to wait until after the funeral because right now he can only take so much.  The bactaids are sitting there right next to him and he picks one up and presses it to his cheek.  Then he gets to his feet and washes the blood off his face. 

Great.

He’ll look like he got into a bar fight at his dad’s funeral.

He supposes there are worse things in life.

Like his dad’s twenty-something widow getting a full on glance at his cock.

He groans again.

He does make it downstairs in the end.  He dresses in the dark suit he’d gotten himself last year as a _you got a good raise_ gift after his annual review, and wears a black shirt and tie with it.  His mother will likely think he looks like a delinquent, or a punk-pop wannabe, but he thinks it looks good.  Rey is wearing dark black leggings under the little black dress, and a navy blue cardigan.  She is staring at the puzzle she’d been working on the night before, clearly too embarrassed to acknowledge his presence.

Which is more than fine by him.

He drinks his coffee in silence, then goes to find his mother who is—typically—in her study.

She’s gazing out of the window, looking so very sad.

“Rey doesn’t have her own clothes?” he asks a little dryly.

His mother gives him a silent _don’t do this now_ , and he backs down.  He goes and stands by the window, peering out into the woods behind the house.  “He didn’t leave anything out there, did he?”  His dad had hid some of his contraband in the woods for as long as Ben can remember.

“Chewie says no, and I’d trust Chewie more than I’d trust Han about it,” his mother sighs.  Her hand finds Ben’s and she squeezes it. 

Anger bubbles in him.

_Why is she so upset now?  They got divorced.  She didn’t even fight for him, fight for them._

“I’m glad you’re here,” Leia says.  “I’m glad you came.  I—I’ve missed you, Ben.  A lot.  And I don’t want us to go another five years without talking.”

He looks down at her and bites his fucking tongue.  Anger.  Just— _anger_ as he looks down at her.  Can she sense it?  Can she feel the way it’s vibrating in him, turning him into an uncontrollable monster the way his anger always has? 

“You seem to have been doing just fine without me.”

It just slips out of him and her face goes slack. 

“Why do you always have to say things like that?” she demands and she rips her hand out of his and just like that, she’s gone.  He stands there for a long while, staring out the window, not really taking in the snowy landscape. 

 _God why can’t you control yourself,_ he thinks angrily.  He’d known he had to bite his fucking tongue, he’d _known_ it and then he’d just said that like a—

He turns away from the window and his eyes land on his mother’s desk for the first time.  There’s a photo of his father standing on the desk in a nice frame.  There always has been, but this one’s different from the old one.  The old one is of his dad when he’d been about thirty, around when he and his mother had met.  This one’s his dad…it would have had to have been after the divorce, he didn’t have as much grey hair the last time Ben had seen him.

Ben looks around the office.

All his mother old photographs are there—photos of Luke, and her parents, the photo of her getting sworn in as Senator the first time when Ben was still trying to be everything she wanted him to be.  He’s standing next to her with his dad, looming over both of them, too large to be their child, surely.  He’s a good foot taller than them.  Too large for this life, too much.  That’s always been the problem.

Too much for himself sometimes too.

He leaves the office and finds his mother and Rey putting on their coats.  His mother gives him such a wounded look as she buttons the top button, and doesn’t say a word; Rey still can’t bring herself to look at him. 

“I’ll take my car,” Ben tells them as they leave the house.  They probably don’t want him around.  It’ll be easier that way. 

“Ben,” his mother begins, but Ben shrugs and makes his way to his car.  The cold hasn’t killed his engine, thank god, and it turns on easily, though it takes a few minutes to heat up properly.

The drive to the graveyard is short, and there are already a few cars parked outside the gates.  His mother and Rey are talking to a few people just outside the door.  A black man with closely cropped hair that Ben doesn’t know gives Rey a deep hug.  Lando is talking somberly to his mother, and from the way that he sees him glance at Ben, he can guess what they might be talking about. 

“Uncle Lando,” he says tentatively and Lando extends a hand.  Ben shakes it. 

“I hear you’re still at First Order,” Lando says and with all the subtle ease that he’s always had, Ben finds himself being steered into the graveyard, away from his mother and—more importantly—away from Luke, who has just arrived too. 

“Yeah,” Ben says.  “Coming up on six years pretty soon.”

“Six years.  That’s a long time,” Lando says.  “You like it.”

“It’s…” he thinks of Hux and his snide comments, thinks of Snoke and his words of promise, thinks of how tiring it’s getting to be the gateway to the man’s whims for everyone in the goddamn company who wants a moment with him.  He shrugs.

“I read somewhere that if you’ve been at a place for longer than five years, it’s time to find a new place.  Stretch your wings a little.”

Ben gives him a look.  “Did she tell you to say that?”

Lando laughs.  “You think she wouldn’t just say so herself?”

“She already has,” Ben says.

“Case and point.”  He looks around.  “Look, I know nepotism ain’t the best way to role, but you’re not really my nephew so we can’t call it nepotism.  If you ever get tired of that place, come work for me.”

“Are you seriously offering me a job?  What if I’m terrible?”

“Snoke would have fired you a long time ago without scruples if you were.  Besides, it’d make your old man turn over in his grave if he thought that you were working with me.  Never stopped giving me shit for going straight.”

“On this, the day of his funeral,” Ben jokes, half-smiling for the first time today.

“I can think of no greater honor.”

“What do you even do anyway?” Ben asks.  Uncle Lando has always been vague about it, which has always made Ben suspect that perhaps he hasn’t gone quite as straight as his father had always accused him of.

“This and that,” Lando says, and Ben’s even _more_ convinced than he had been a moment before.  “Consulting’s like that.  It’s all very project based and projects are unique.  I can assure you, it’s all above board.  And I can offer you a competitive salary and some really good benefits.”

“Oh yeah?” Ben’s still laughing.  _Benefits_ , he wonders, shaking his head.  He’s always been healthy as a horse, so the shitty First Order health benefits that he’s had for years have always worked just fine for him.  He gets stock at the employee rate as well, which has done good things for his bank account.  Somehow he doubts Lando’s consulting company’s benefits could really give him what he wants.

“Lots of vacation time,” Lando winks.

As if Ben needs more time to himself.

“I’ll think about it, Uncle Lando,” Ben tells him, though.

They’re approaching the grave site, a big gaping hole with a contraption stretched over it to lower the coffin down.

The coffin is a plain brown box, a simple star carved onto the front of it.  Ben wishes it weren’t so snowy.  He’d pick up a rock and place it on the box.  He hadn’t thought of anything to send down with his father.  Absently, he thinks about the dice he’d found on his bed.  He’d put them in his pocket this morning before going downstairs.  He could put them there.

But no, his mother had put them on the bed for him.  Dad would have wanted him to keep them.  _Besides, I need all the luck I can get._

For a moment, when she gets near, he wonders if his mother is going to stand next to him or if she’ll keep her distance.  But she does settle next to him in the end and he takes her hand and she squeezes it. 

“Sorry,” he mutters to her.  She sighs and looks up at him and she looks so tired.  And frighteningly old. 

The rav says some words that Ben barely pays attention to.  He’s staring at the box in front of him.  Dad’s in there.  Dad’s in there and Ben never got a chance to say goodbye.  He never will. 

 _You left mom,_ he thinks and he feels the anger flare in him again.  He remembers Han Solo teaching him how to play baseball, rubbing his hair, telling him to be good, telling him to take it easy, telling him that life’s hard, but living it’s harder.  And he remembers Chewie having to talk the sheriff out of arresting them because Ben was in the back seat and they weren’t really going to arrest Han while his son was in the car, were they?  He remembers his father shirking responsibility left and right, never taking the blame for anything even when it was his fault, getting caught with his pants down and not quite being able to squirm away.

_You left mom._

_I miss you._

A tear squeezes its way out of his eye and down his nose.  It lands in the snow at his feet and sinks.  Does it freeze?  Or is it not cold enough?  Does it even matter now that he can’t see it anymore?

The coffin gets lowered into the frozen earth and his mother accepts the shovel the rav is handing her.  The numb thought of why was the rav handing it to his mother and not Rey flees his mind to the hollow, drum-like sound the coffin makes as the dirt lands on it.  Then she turns and hands the shovel to Ben.

The rest is a blur, his eyes out of focus, his breathing a little too loud in his own ears.  By the time he feels normal again, he’s walking alongside his mother back out of the graveyard to the cars.

“Are you sure we can’t bring anything?” Leia asks Chewie.  Ben’s ears are still ringing with the drum-like sound that had gotten softer and softer the more dirt that the mourners had shoveled onto the coffin.

“No, we’ve got it covered,” Maz says at the same time that Chewie says, “They were out of Ebla yesterday but should be restocked by now.” 

Maz gives Chewie a sharp look, and begins to say, “We’ve got it _covered_ ,” but Ben says, “I can get it.”

Except he’s not the only person to say it.

Neither he nor Rey is quite quick enough to think of a polite way to let the other go before Leia looks at both of them and says, a little wetly, “Thank you both,” and she goes back to her car leaving the two of them, rooted to the spot.

Rey’s face is pink; Ben’s sure his has gone pale.  _Ok then._

“I’m sorry about this morning,” Rey says the moment she’s back in the second seat of his car.  Now that he knows the jacket can’t be his father’s—his father would never own a jacket that big—he wonders _where_ she’d gotten it.  Because it really is much too big for her.  “I should have waited.”

“It’s…let’s just put it behind us, shall we?” Ben says.  His knuckles are white on the steering wheel as he drives them towards the grocery store.

“Yes,” Rey agrees quickly.  “I was thinking—we should pick up some things for the house while we’re there.  Leia keeps putting off a grocery run and it’s starting to get sparse.  I worry she’s not eating enough.”

“Yeah?” Ben asks.

“Didn’t you see how she barely touched dinner last night?” Rey asks him.

No.  He hadn’t.  He’d been drunk and annoyed.  His silence says it all and Rey sighs.  “We need to make sure she’s eating.  It’s been hard for her.  I—” but she cuts herself off and out of the corner of his eye, he sees her flush a little bit. 

 _Yeah.  You._ Ben thinks bitterly.  If Rey had never come along, then Leia wouldn’t have lost her husband, wouldn’t have alienated her son, wouldn’t have…

But he feels too guilty about this morning to say it, so instead he just sighs, and shifts in the driver’s seat.

The grocery store is mostly empty.  It’s a weekday, and he goes off to find the beer while Rey gets a cart and picks up veggies and fruit and a few other things that they can quickly throw into the fridge before heading over to Chewie and Maz’s. 

 _God the beer here is terrible,_ Ben sighs as he looks through the fridge.  They seem to still be out of Ebla so he looks for a case of Phibian because he remembers that’s what his dad used to get when they were out of Elba.  It’s been a while since Ben drank IPAs.  They always reminded him too much of home.

“Ben?”

He hears her from far away and she sounds anxious, frightened. 

“Rey?”

“Ben?”  There’s relief now and that’s fucking weird but also oddly scary so he leaves the beer fridges and begins making his way towards her.

“Rey?”

“Ben?”

It’s like some sick game, calling her name, checking each aisle he passes for her until he finds her, standing there in the soda aisle, just sort of staring off into space.

“What’s going on?” he asks her, and her head turns towards him but her gaze is unfocused and there are not so much tears in her eyes as tears streaming down her face.  “Rey?”

He’s standing right next to her but she’s still staring off in the distance until he speaks and she turns her head and tries to focus on him.  “I can’t see,” she whispers.

“What?”

“I can’t—can you take my hand, please?”

“You can’t _see_?”

His heart is pounding in his chest.  What the actual fuck is going on?

“Please just take my hand.”

He does and she seems to sag with relief.  “It’s a flareup,” she says.  “It’ll—it’ll pass.”

“Rey, if you can’t see, we should go to a doctor.”

“It usually goes away on its own, but if it doesn’t, I have an appointment tomorrow,” she tells him.  Yes—the one she’d been going to when she crashed the car.  She’d crashed a car. 

“Yesterday when you—”

“No, that was just ice on the road,” she says. “Believe me, I was panickedly checking for symptoms when you pulled up.”

“Symptoms?”

He has no idea what’s going on and can feel panic building in his chest because what the _fuck_ is she talking about—symptoms, and losing her sight as though it’s normal—which is probably why he feels relief when Rey explains, “I have MS, Ben.  Symptoms are bonkers sometimes.” 

“Ah.”

And then the guilt comes flooding back in, because he had been feeling _relieved_ when Rey told him she has Multiple Sclerosis. 

With the hand that’s not in his, she wipes away the tears on her face.  “Anyway,” she says.  “Can we finish this together?”

“Do you want me to take you back to the car?” he asks her.  “We don’t have to do this now if you—”

“No, we can,” she replies.

“Or—there’s a bench by the checkout—”

“No.  I don’t want to sit there waiting, please.  I’m not a child.  Let’s just finish.  If my vision hasn’t started righting itself, I can rest while you go to the wake.”

She sounds so stubborn right now that Ben does exactly as she asks.  With one hand, he pushes the cart and with the other he leads Rey down the aisles, collecting this and that.  She knows the store so well that she doesn’t even need to guess what’s on what aisle.

Ben settles her in the front seat of the car before loading the groceries into the trunk.  Then they drive back to the house in complete silence.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks her as he helps her up the stairs and into the guest bedroom.  Except it’s far too furnished to be a guest bedroom.  It has personal effects, and a photograph of her and the black man she’d hugged at the funeral, grinning and eating ice cream together.  She climbs onto the bed and stares up blankly at the ceiling.

“A wet towel, please.  And water, I suppose,” she says and he gets her a glass, placing it on her bedside table. 

“It’s right here,” he says, taking her hand and guiding it to the glass.  She nods.  “Where do you want the towel?”

“Back of my neck, please," she says and carefully, he lifts her head and settles it there.  “Thanks.”

“Do you want me to stay with you?” he asks.  He doesn’t feel like he should leave her alone.  That feels like a very bad idea.

“You should go to the wake,” she says.  “I’m going to stay in bed until you all get back, and it should just—it should—”

Ben goes into his mom’s bedroom and grabs the portable phone from the dock by her bed.  “I’m going to call in a little while,” he says.  “Just to check in.  Or if mom wants to—”

Because of course his mother would know.

Of course.

How could she not?

“—check in.”

Rey nods, and turns her head towards where she thinks he’s standing and smiles.  “It’ll be ok,” she says in a tone of forced optimism.  “I promise.  No need to freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out,” he tells her.

“You are,” she replies.  “It’s clear as day in your tone of voice.  I’ll see you later.  I promise.  I’ll see…” she waves her hand vaguely over her face.  Is she trying to joke about this? 

She sighs.  “Go,” she tells him.

And he does.

Confusedly.  No— _bewilderedly_.  Dazedly. 

❖

It’s not until he gets to Maz and Chewie’s that he realizes that he had completely forgotten to pick up the beer at the grocery store. 

He sits there in the car for a long while, trying to decide if he should go to the grocery store and pick some up, but it’s like his brain is short circuiting a little bit.  _You shouldn’t have left her alone.  You shouldn’t have made her comfort you while she was having a—an attack? Is that the right word for it?  You should have taken her to a doctor, or called mom, or—_

There’s a rap on the window and Ben looks up.  His mother is standing there in her coat, frowning down at him.  “Ben?”  He leans over and opens the door for her.  “Where’s Rey?”

“Back at the house,” he says. 

“What did you do?” his mother asks at the same time that he says, “She has MS?”

His mother’s face reacts so quickly that it’s almost terrifying.  He’s far too used to his mother not reacting, hiding deep down inside her anything that frightens her, or that worries her.  Anger—oh yes, that flares.  He came by his temper naturally.  “What happened?” Leia asks him.

“Her vision went out at the store,” Ben says.  “She’s resting now.  She wouldn’t let me take her to a doctor.  Said it’d go away.  Said I should come to the wake and she’d take care of herself.”

His mother leans back in the seat and closes her eyes. 

And the anger—that’s been so close to the surface all day, the one that had flared this morning, is back. 

“Is that why she lives with you?  Did dad sucker you into taking care of her after the divorce?  He would do something like that.”  Play on his mother’s nurturing side, the side that always wants to help—especially the fucking nightmare broken health care system she can’t get the senate to actually legislate on.  “Did he fucking land you with his fucking squeeze because he—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Ben, get your head out of your ass,” his mother snaps at him. 

“Get _my_ head out of my ass?  She’s not your family, mom.  And trust me—I feel for her situation, but—”

“Your father and I didn’t break up, Ben.  We got divorced, but we didn’t break up.  It was actually going to be _cheaper_ to put her on your father’s health insurance plan as a spouse that it would be to bump her up to full-time and then pay for her to—”

“Wait—what?”

“She worked for your father.  Did drives for him.  And then one day, she got into a car accident because her vision went out.  Most MS diagnoses don’t happen until you’re much older, but it’s not impossible to get it young.  She was nineteen and scared and if she didn’t get care, you bet your ass it would have gotten worse.”  His mother is trembling with—with Ben doesn’t even know what because his head is spinning.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he snarls.  “Last night, when I got here—”

“I don’t know, Ben, maybe because I hadn’t spoken to you in five years and I was bitter.  Or maybe I just wanted to spend some time with you before delving into the insurance fraud I helped your father commit.  Or maybe I didn’t want you flying off the handle before Luke came over because—”

“Because he can’t know.”  Luke’s a judge.  Because that would have gotten so sticky so fast. 

“Because he can’t know,” Leia agrees.  “At least, not yet.  Not until we’ve sorted out this _mess_ with Han’s will.”  She sighs and looks at him.  “I was going to tell you, Ben.  Tonight—or maybe tomorrow.”

“But god forbid you tell me at some point in the last five years,” he huffs.

“Oh please.  I wasn’t going to put anything in writing or leave a voicemail that anyone could hear.”

“You don’t trust me to keep your shit—”

“I trust you plenty.  I _don’t_ trust other people who might dig around in your stuff to find out dirt for election seasons.  Because the story wouldn’t have been how broken our medical system is that Rey would be punished for not being able to pay for treatment she’ll need until she does—oh no.  It’ll be about the insurance fraud.  Did you know our taxes actually went _down_ after he married her?  This whole system is broken.”

Ben doesn’t know what to say.  He doesn’t.  He’s just sitting there, staring at the car that’s parked right in front of him.  He’s got that buzzing in his head again, the one that had gotten so loud that he’d dropped out of law school. 

“This is exactly the shit that makes me think you don’t care about me, you know,” he mutters at last.  “This right here.  I spent the past five _years_ thinking that you and dad—that—why couldn’t her parents have helped or something?”

“What parents?” Leia asks with a bitter laugh, and Ben immediately remembers the conversation they’d had last night about the foster system because, like a fool, he’d forgotten.  “She doesn’t have parents, Ben.  She’s everything that she’s made herself, and the only person who could possibly have helped her apart from us is Finn, and he certainly doesn’t have the capacity to take on the financial experience of a chronic illness.”

“So you got to be her replacement parents and you got a replacement child out of it.  I get it.”  He wants to cry.

“Ben, sweetheart.” His mother sounds exhausted.  “We could _never_ replace you.  I would never _want_ to.  Rey isn’t like you at all, and—”

“That must be so much easier,” he says and he looks out of the window and away from his mother.  The trees are there with their skeleton arms, black against the white snow.  “Everything’s easier when I’m not around, right?”

“It’s not,” his mother insists, squeezing his hand.  “You’re my _child_ Ben.  You think I forgot about you?  That I haven’t worried about you?  That I haven’t wondered what you’re thinking, or doing, or—” She takes a deep, shuddering breath.  “She’s not a replacement for anyone.  And we’re not a replacement for her parents.  She’s had a hard life, and is a good—well, I won’t call her a kid anymore, but she’s a good person.  And her body just decided to make her life that much harder.”

Ben leans forward, resting his head against the steering wheel, squeezing his eyes shut.  He can see Rey there, lying on the bed, staring unseeing up at the ceiling.

“I should go back.  She shouldn’t be alone.”

“Listen,” his mother says, all businesslike now.  “If you go back, she’ll think you’re treating her like she’s a broken doll and that’ll make it worse.”

“She can’t see, mom.  She’s having an MS attack.”

“An episode,” his mother corrects him.  “And yes, she is.  And she shouldn’t be alone, but you’re here now—I assume because she made you come here—which means she feels guilty.  And god, she does feel guilty, Ben.  She blames herself, no matter what your father and I say—” she pauses, and he can hear her heart break again as she corrects the verb tense.  “—said to tell her it wasn’t her fault that you were behaving like this.  I will accept a portion—a _portion_ —of the responsibility because we didn’t tell you the way we should have, but you’re a grown adult who is completely responsible for his own actions.  You don’t get to blame Rey.  And you only get to blame me a little bit before you’ve used up your quota.  You decide how you react to the things that hurt you.  Not me.”

Her words hang in the air, like she’s expecting him to respond.  But Ben’s on overload right now.  He feels like he’s a towel that’s been soaking in every piece of everything—good and bad—for _years_ and only now is he starting to get rung out.  He wonders if the fibers have started to rot and waste away as he’d soaked. 

And the last thing he wants to do right now, for the first time in years, is blame Rey.  Rey who’d seemed almost determined not to see him as a fuck up last night, even when he was fucking up, because he always fucks up.  God, he’d just left her alone.  Why had he left her alone?

“Anyway—she sent you here because she feels guilty.  So we’ll go inside for a little while, and then one of us will go.”

“I can just go now,” he said.  “I don’t need to go and pretend to be nice to people who know I haven’t spoken to my parents in five years.”

“Yes you do, because a good number of them _don’t_ actually know that,” she said.  “Chewie and Maz do.  And Lando.  And Luke.  Everyone else just thinks you’re busy and that’s why you haven’t been back.”

Ben sits up, gaping at them.  “Of course.  Because you needed to continue this happy family lie in order to—”

“Because do you know how hard it is to tell people your son’s not talking to you?  Even barring the fact that I don’t think we did anything to deserve—”

“You _lied_ to me.”

“—you didn’t even give us the time to explain.”

“No, I just saw you not giving up a fight and that was it.  Everything.  All I could think was that you’d stayed together for the kid.”

He doesn’t mean to say it.  He doesn’t even know that he’d been thinking it, all these years, every dark moment that he’d fixated on the fact that his parents weren’t together anymore.  But it rings so true that they both sit there, gutted.

“Let’s not do this right now,” he says at last.  “Let’s—let’s just go inside.  I’ll stick around for a few minutes and then I’ll go back and check on Rey.”

“We loved each other.  I love—” She’s crying, heavy, shuddering sobs that wrack her body. 

“I know, mom,” he says and he pulls her into his arms.  When had he ever comforted his mother before in his life?  When had she ever let herself be comforted?  Everything is broken and his head hurts.  “I know.”

“I know there are ways that I could have been a better mother,” she cries into his neck.  “I know it.  I know it so deeply.  This isn’t the only thing I could have done better.  But I want to focus on being better moving forward, not—dragging up all these things that hurt.  That—that I can’t fix, or undo except to not do them again.  Please, Ben.  Please know that.”

“I know,” he says again, and it’s like his whole body, his whole soul, has gone still for the first time since he was born.

“What’ll we tell people about Rey?” he asks as they get out of his car. 

“I usually say she has a migraine when it flares up.  It’d make sense today—her husband just got…got buried.”

“How did you do it?  Pretending to all those people—”

“Maz and Chewie know,” she said.  “That was enough.  And Lando worked it out in about five seconds.  Said that there was _no way_ that Han would go for Rey unless she role-played me or something.”  She rolls her eyes.  “He always did have quite the imagination.”

Ben groans as they’re halfway up the walkway. 

“What?” Leia says, looking back at him.  “Blame Lando for that one not—”

“No.  I forgot to get the beer,” he said. 

His mother’s face softens.  “Don’t worry about that,” she says.  “It’s not a big deal at all.”

“But I—”

“Come inside, Ben,” his mother says.  “Please.”

So he does.

❖

Ben lets himself into his mother’s house an hour later and climbs the stairs. 

The wake hadn’t been totally painful.  Chewie had given him the cold shoulder the whole time, and Uncle Luke had been avoidable.  But he’d been glad when he’d slipped out after thirty minutes to drive back to the quiet of his mother’s house.

He knocks on the door to Rey’s bedroom and waits until she murmurs, “Come in,” before entering.

She’s still lying on the bed.  She’s taken off her boots and the leggings—god her legs really do go on for days and his mother’s dress is so very short—but other than that, she’s in the same place he’d left her, towel behind her neck.  The water glass is half-empty.  Her cheeks are pink and damp, and her sightless eyes are bloodshot.

“Hey,” he says and he sits down on the bed next to her. 

“You should be at the wake,” she tells him.  Her throat sounds clogged.  “He’d want you—”

“Chances are he’d want me to do the right thing, which in this case isn’t leaving you alone and blind in your bedroom.”

Rey lets out a sob.  “I’m fine.  I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, remembering what his mother had said in the car about her not wanting to feel like a broken doll.  “You can.  I just want to make sure you’re not alone.”

She doesn’t say anything and he sits there, unsure.

Instinct tells him to reach for her, to hug her.  She’s been crying and she’s—

Well, he doesn’t know what she is anymore.  Not his stepmother, though she is, technically, his stepmother.  His mother made it sound like he should think of her as a sister more than anything else.  He’s never had a sister before.  Aren’t you supposed to hug your little sister when she’s been crying?

“Mom told me,” he says at last.  “About—about everything.  And I’m sorry I’ve been a bit of an ass to you.”

“You didn’t know,” she says.

“Yeah, but I was still a bit of an ass to you, and you know it.  I heard you on the phone last night.”  It doesn’t make a difference to him if she knows how much he’d heard now.  Nothing is what it was an hour ago, much less last night. _You’re a grown adult who is completely responsible for his own actions.  You decide how you react to the things that hurt you._

“A bit,” Rey admits.  She gives him a half-hearted smile.

“Can we start over?”

“I like how we started.  You were kind when we started,” Rey says, sitting up slowly.  “Let’s forget the middle bit.”

Ben smiles.  “That works.”

She reaches a hand for him and he takes it and they shake awkwardly because she can’t really see him.  Her half smile is there, but it looks forced, distracted, probably because she can’t see his face. 

Which is why he decides to hug her.  He just pulls her into his arms and she lets out a very surprised sound before she just sort of relaxes.

Ben’s had girlfriends before.  Not serious ones, not ones who have lasted very long, but he’s had them.  He’s held a girl before. 

But that’s nothing close to what it’s like holding Rey.  Why?  Because everything fits now, and he understands?  Or because she hadn’t wanted to hate him even last night when she’d been at his throat?  All he knows is that holding her changes something he didn’t know could change in him.  It’s like he can’t breathe; it’s like he’s never breathed properly in his life until just this moment.

“Oh,” she sort of mumbles and then she’s sort of nuzzling against his chest and he feels dampness against his shirt because she’s crying again.

“It’s ok,” he whispers.  “It’s ok.”  And for the third time, he says, “You’re not alone.”

“Neither are you,” she mumbles back and he was wrong— _now_ it’s like he can’t breathe.

Because he doesn’t like to think about how alone he feels.  And somehow, within a day of knowing him, Rey had just—known.

Carefully, he lies them down on the bed and he just keeps holding her until she’s cried herself out. 

“How’d you meet my dad?” he asks her at last.  Now that he knows enough, there’s a burning curiosity about the details he still doesn’t have.

“He needed a truck driver,” Rey says.  “I didn’t know what he did until after I’d done a few runs for him.  Not like a tractor-trailer or anything. Just bigger than a pick-up.  It was a part time gig, but I’ve _never_ had a part time gig pay so well.  Didn’t take long to work out why.”

Ben snorts.  He can only imagine the sort of runs his father had Rey do.  _Pay them well enough that they’ll never rat you out,_ his father had said.  As if he hadn’t had a soft spot in his heart for all the people he picked to work for him.

No wonder he’d married her to give her health insurance.  It was right up his ridiculous alley.

“I worked for him for about…eight months or so before I…” she makes a vague gesture with her hand that he only half-sees out of the corner of his eye because he’s still holding her close.  She hasn’t pulled away; he hasn’t let her go.  This is nice, not to be pushed away.  Not to feel as though he’s too much, or not right—that he’s just enough.

“I was on a job,” she continues.  “And I was almost back and I crashed the car.  I was knocked unconscious.  Lucky I was close because Chewie came out to see if I’d had trouble.  It was icy and he found me in the truck and brought me to the hospital.  And when I woke up, I couldn’t see.”  She gulps.  “It comes and it goes.  Being stressed makes it worse.”

“And you’ve been stressed,” Ben observes.  Because of course she has been.  His father died, and she’d crashed her car, and—“How long before the insurance stops?”

She swallows.  “I’ve got a few months,” she says.  “Leia helped me work it out the day before you drove up.  I think she was glad to have something to do.  She was—she is—”

Not eating enough, Rey had said earlier.  And a little listless.  And constantly reaching for his hand, which she has never done before in her life.  _Coping._   Only barely.  If at all. 

“A couple of months,” Rey repeats quietly and Ben’s arms tighten around her. 

“Don’t,” he tells her.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t catastrophize.  We’ll figure something out.”

The words are out of his mouth before he can really process that somehow they’re a _we_ now. It’s jarring.  It feels right.

“But what if we don’t?” she whispers.  “Then what’ll I have? At least I can start planning now if—”

“We’ll figure it out.  You think he’d ever forgive us if we didn’t?”

“That’s a lovely sentiment, but it’s not practical.”

“Fuck practical,” Ben growls.  “You’re part of the family, aren’t you?”

The words hang in the air and Rey slowly pulls away from him.  _Just like family._ Except it doesn’t sting.  Her eyes are directed to where she must think his face is, and they’re over-bright again.  “Am I?” she asks slowly.  “Part of the family?”

“I seem to recall refusing to meet you because you were,” Ben says.  “You’re getting all my dad’s money too.  I suppose you could bolt, but here’s the thing: people in my family don’t run unless they also come back.”  That was his dad.  Uncle Luke, too, after a fashion.

He supposes that’s him now too.  Because he’s sort of back now, isn’t he?  Not that he’d call what he’d done running.

He doesn’t know what he did.  He doesn’t know what to call it.  He doesn’t know that it matters.  All that matters now, he supposes, is that he feels guilty.  _Something to atone for at High Holy Days,_ he supposes.

It takes him a moment to realize that Rey is sobbing again—sobbing harder than before.  She’s twisted away from him and has buried her face in the pillow and is just crying.  Crying so hard and Ben wonders what on _earth_ he could have said to have made her cry this hard when he was trying to make her feel better.

“It’s ok,” he tells her, rubbing a hand over her back.  “It’s—” In all honesty, he doesn’t know what the fuck it is.  They buried his father this morning, Rey can’t see anything, his mother’s barely coping because, as it turns out, she and his father had never broken up.  And Ben’s feeling calm for once in his fucking life.  He feels almost like how he’s wanted to feel ever since he’d realized he didn’t feel this way. 

“Sorry,” Rey mumbles.

He almost laughs.  “Sorry for _what_?”

“For—everything I suppose.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was—if I hadn’t—”

“I’ve discussed this with my mother,” he says.  “And she’s already said she’ll take the blame for a certain amount, and I’ve committed—though I haven’t exactly told her—to a different certain amount, but we both agree you’re not to blame here.  For any of it.”

She just keeps crying and Ben wraps an arm around her again, lying flat on his stomach next to her.  She’s so warm next to him.  And—not small.  She’s not a small person, she’s making his mother’s usually demure dress look positively inappropriate—but she fits under his chin well.  He’s huge and it’s hard to find girls who fit under his chin well.

 _Stop,_ he tells himself at once.  _Sister._

Except she takes that exact moment to burrow into his side again, her face nuzzling against his neck now and when his hand stops moving, it’s at the small of her back, and they’re both just lying there, breathing.

She mumbles something into the pillow.  “I couldn’t hear you,” he says gently.

“I said I’ve never had a family before,” she replies.

“They’re overrated sometimes,” Ben says darkly, thinking of his uncle, thinking of the trembling rage he’d felt all day at his mother and father.  “Nothing hurts quite like family.”

“Yeah, I got that part out of mine,” she replies.  “Yours seems good, though.”

Ben swallows.  That was always the problem.  That his seemed good.  That he never seemed good enough for it.  “My uncle’s an asshole,” he says and Rey laughs.

“He doesn’t like me much,” she agrees. 

A day ago, the mere concept of what Ben’s about to say would have made his innards shrivel up with anger.  But now it feels like the most natural thing to say in the world, “Yeah, well, you’re in good company.”

She laughs and sort of butts her head against his.  Is this normal sibling stuff?  Chewie’s son is like a billion years older than him, and Lando’s kids are a billion years younger.  He’s never had anyone sibling-like who was close to his own age.  He’ll follow Rey’s lead, he supposes, remembering the black man she’d hugged, the one in her photograph.  Her boyfriend?  But no, his mom had just implied that they were friends.  If he was her boyfriend, surely Rey wouldn’t be nuzzling against him like this.  Or maybe she would because they’re friends.  Maybe Rey just nuzzles at people who make her feel safe.

Finn.  He was probably Finn, the one she’d been talking to on the phone last night, the one his mother had told him about.

“He’s why I cared what you thought of me,” Rey says after a while. 

“Hm?”

“Last night—when you asked why I cared.  It’s because your father was the most generous person I’ve ever known.  Your mother too.  You’re their son and they love you so much and I spent such a long time being bitter that you’d just leave them like that.  I wanted to hate you for it.  God, I did for years.  I was so ready to shred you to pieces for what you did.  But the second you came through the door, and you were the nice man from the roadside, I wanted you to know that they mean the world to me.  And that I didn’t mean to break everything just by existing and—“

“Stop it,” Ben interrupts her.  “You don’t get to blame yourself for this, remember?”

Rey swallows, and takes a long breath and Ben…well, Ben’s so far past saturation that he can barely process what she’d just said.

“Thanks for coming back,” Rey whispers. 

“Of course.  I wasn’t going to just leave you.”

She’s shuddering again and nuzzling against him again, and he turns on his side to pull her to his chest again.

❖

It’s only when Ben wakes that he realized he’d fallen asleep like that, with Rey in his arms.  It’s dark outside and—

He frowns.

He’d gotten back here a little after noon, and yeah, it gets dark early, but that’s still several hours.  Rey is still in his arms, but she’d turned around and now her back is against his chest, her rear nestled between his lower stomach and his thighs and his—

He’d groan, except he’d wake her.  God he hopes she’s asleep.  Because he’s hard as a rock right now. 

Great.  Just great.

He tries to work out whether this would be more embarrassing than this morning or not, and comes up with no response.

He lets go of her and pulls away from her slightly, squinting at his watch to see if he can get the time.  The hands have little glow-in-the-dark bits on the end of them and he watches the second hand creep across the surface as he calculates the angle and—

Six thirty.  It’s six thirty in the evening. 

Rey stirs next to him, nestling her ass towards his hips again and then freezing.

“What time is it?” she asks a little breathlessly.

“Half past six,” he says.  “I’m gonna go check on mom.”  _And calm the fuck out of my dick._

“Right,” she says.  “Can you grab the light switch?  I want to see if I can—if it’s gotten a little—”

He has his back to her when he gets the light and glances over his shoulder.  Her gaze is still unfocused, but she looks relieved. 

“Very blurry,” she says.  “But better than it was.”  She’s looking at his head, and smiles.  Ben’s heart does this weird floppy thing in his chest. 

“Be back in a bit,” he tells her.

He goes into his room, closes the door and takes a deep, deep breath. 

What the fuck was that? 

He looks down at his dick.  “Chill, will you?”

It twitches, and he closes his eyes and does his best not to think about Rey, warm in his arms and how—

—how he slept better in that bed with her for six hours better than he had in just about years.

 _She’s your dad’s widow,_ he thinks forcefully.  _And she can’t see anything right now._

He needs to find his mom, so he really needs to get this situation with his dick sorted out—and fast.

But after five minutes when it hasn’t gone down he decides that the only option is to take the matter into his own hands.  And he does his best to tell himself he’s not thinking of Rey’s legs as his hand pumps his hard-on.  He does his best to tell himself he’s not thinking of what it would look like to make her smile, make her sigh, after she’d spent so much of that afternoon in tears. 

But Ben’s never been good at lying to himself when it really counts and when his spunk fills the towel he’d used after showering that morning, it’s with the memory of Rey’s ass pressed against him right at the forefront of his mind. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to artemisgirl for chatting through some MS details with me after I posted the first chapter! I really appreciate the time <3
> 
> [Ebla Beer](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ebla_beer)   
>  [Phibian Beer](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Phibian_beer)


	3. Chapter 3

His mother is sitting at her desk, going through old photographs.

“Hello,” she says, smiling in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes.  “You were asleep when I got home.”  _I saw you wrapped around Rey like that._   If she were in a different state of mind, he’s sure that she’d be teasing him.  If his dad were alive, he’s _sure_ they’d both be going just about nuts right now.  _Trying to steal my wife from me, kid?_

“Yeah,” he says.  “It’s been…” his voice trails away.  He doesn’t need to say what it’s been.  His mom already knows.  “I’m sorry about this morning,” he tells her.  

“Oh, don’t,” she says, “It’s been…” she says it the exact same way he’d just said it. 

“Yeah, but I’m trying to take responsibility for how I react to things,” he points out.

She gives him a gentle smile.  “I appreciate that,” she says softly.  She reaches for his hand and he takes it.  “Thoughts on dinner?”

“I was going to say let’s go out, but I don’t know if that’d work for Rey,” he says.  “She says she can see a little better.”

“Yes, it usually starts to ease back in after a few hours,” Leia says.  “But I doubt it will be fully there tonight.  She’s awake?”

“Yeah,” Ben says. 

“Maz sent me home with more food than could fit in my car, so we’ve definitely got options here.”  His mother gives him another tired smile.  “I think she doesn’t want to worry about me having to feed myself for the next month or so.”

She gets to her feet and together, they go into the kitchen together, opening the fridge.  “Soup, I think,” she says. “Will you heat it up?  Maz made matzah balls again.”

Of course she did.  It was his dad’s favorite, and she’d brought it to seder for just about as long as Ben could remember.  Ben takes it out of the plastic container and pours it into a saucepan while his mother disappears up the stairs.  He hears voices, as he waits in the kitchen, hears the upstairs toilet flush, and then hears two sets of footsteps making their way slowly down the stairs.  His mother comes into the kitchen, guiding Rey by the hand and helps her into a chair.  Then she joins Ben by the stove and helps him spoon soup into three bowls, each with one large matzah ball. 

“Where’s Luke tonight?” Rey asks.

“He’s still with Chewie.”  Leia glances at Ben.  “I sort of let him think that we fought in the car, and that it would be better if he weren’t around tonight.”

Ben shrugs.  Now that he’s on the inside, he doesn’t care what lies they tell Uncle Luke if it means he doesn’t have to see Uncle Luke.  His mother reads that in his face and continues, a little dryly, “Don’t look so pleased.  He’s coming over for breakfast tomorrow to talk about the will.”

“How long’s he going to be in town?” Ben asks.

“He says he’ll stay as long as he needs,” his mother replies, a little noncommittally.  Ben glances at Rey to share a look with her before remembering that of course, she still can’t see.

But she’s doing well with her soup.  One of her hands is wrapped around the bowl while the other is moving the spoon carefully to and from her mouth.  Her motions are smooth.  Her grip is strong.  _Just her eyes, then._

Ben doesn’t know much about MS, except that it affects everyone differently.  But most of what he’d heard before was that there’s shakiness, numbness.  But that doesn’t seem to be affecting Rey at all.  But Ben can’t help but notice that the motion seems practiced—as though she’s used to having to guide her spoon sightlessly to her face.  It makes his heart twist.

“Chewie’ll bring your car over tomorrow,” Leia says to Rey.  “But I’d sooner you didn’t drive it just yet, though.”

“No,” Rey agrees.  “You said one of you could drive me to my appointment?”

“I can,” Ben says.  “What time is it?”

“Eight AM,” Rey replies.  “Early, I know, but it’s the only time they could make work.”

“I’ll tell Luke to come over around nine, then,” Leia says.  “Or earlier.  He probably will want to talk for a bit without anyone being around.”

Ben nods.

“And he doesn’t know—and won’t?” Ben asks slowly.

“No,” Leia says.  “Not yet.”

“Does he know she has MS?”

“No,” Rey says.  “We thought if he knew, he’d work it out.”

“So I should probably not be in the room,” Ben sighs.  “Which is why you didn’t tell me to begin with.  Because everyone knows what happens when Luke and I are in a room together.”

“Ben, sweetheart,” his mother says at once.  “I trust you.  We were—”

“I’m not mad,” Ben says.  Because, oddly, he’s not.  He’s felt calm since he had talked to his mother in the car, calm since he’d woken up in bed with Rey.  His dick twitches unhelpfully in his pants and he shifts in his seat.  “It’s the truth though.  Even without—all this.  It’s not like Luke and I have a great track record since I dropped out.”

Leia grimaces.  “No,” she agrees.  “But you’ll need to be there.  We’ll all need to be there.  All right?  Especially since…I have no right to anything of Han’s in a legal sense.  And—”

“No,” Ben cuts her off.  “No, you can’t—”

“Let me finish, will you?”

“You can’t say you don’t have a right to—”

“Ben, in a legal sense, he and I got divorced.  We split things the way we did because we didn’t have a prenup and we were staying together.  But _legally_ that was my time to claim things and—”

“And you didn’t?”

“I took the lion’s share already.  It’s not like he had _a lot_.”

“Just enough to—”

“His business got a little more…lucrative in the past few years.  He got ahead of some trends in his…market.” 

“I don’t want to know,” Ben mutters. 

“Nor did I,” Leia says.  “Rey has all the details.”  Ben glances at her sharply.  She takes a particularly loud slurp of soup and smiles and it’s more than a little devastating, the way her lips curl up, the way her face changes.  Ben just stares and stares at her.

“Anyway,” his mother continues deliberately and he looks back at her.  “I have no legal claim, and obviously Rey shouldn’t be left penniless—”

“It’s not my money,” she says fiercely, all traces of that smile gone from her face.

“So you want me to gun for it,” Ben says.  “Be the asshole who’s trying to—”

“After that display last night, Luke already _expects_ you to—”

“Yeah, but we’re not leaving her with nothing.  We’re not doing that—not when her health insurance runs out in a few months.”

“I know that, Ben.”

“So basically, you’re saying I have to lie,” Ben continues.  “Mom.  When have I _ever_ been able to lie?  Ever?  I’ve always been a terrible liar.”

“You have been,” his mother says fondly. 

“Look, can’t we say I’m too pissed to be in the room or something?”

“No, we can’t,” Leia says.  “Because your uncle is actually an observant man, and he’ll notice anything we try to do.  You’re going to have to lie to him, Ben.  And you’re going to have to do a good job.”

Ben glares at her.  She glares right back.

“Permission to just make him mad?” Ben asks.  “Diversionary tactic?”

“I’ll consider it,” Leia replies.

It’ll have to be enough.

“I still think,” Rey begins.

“Part of the family, remember?” Ben says forcefully.  “We’re not leaving you high and dry, remember?”

She blinks and drops her sightless gaze down to her soup and Ben sees his mother reach for her hand.

His mother’s soup bowl is still mostly full.  The matzah ball is untouched.  “Mom, eat.  Before it gets cold,” Ben tells her and she gives him a startled look.  She doesn’t let go of Rey’s hand as she begins to have some of her soup. 

“The lengths you all have to go through for this,” Rey begins slowly, “You shouldn’t have to.”

“Maybe not, but we’re here and it’s what we’re doing,” Ben thinks, fully aware that not twelve hours ago, he would probably have said the same thing to Rey.  But it’s the exact sort of hare-brained scheme his dad would have died for, and if there was one thing that could always be said of Han Solo, it was that he knew where to put his heart when it came to doing the right thing.  It’s something Ben’s always wished he could do.  “Maybe you’re worth doing it for.  Dad thought so, and he was right.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees his mother’s eye gleam as she takes a bite of matzah ball.

❖

Ben doesn’t sleep that night.

Probably because he slept for most of the afternoon in Rey’s bed and that’s more sleep than his body is used to.  Also probably because he keeps thinking about Rey lying there next to him, warm and nuzzling against his neck.  He masturbates twice and is grateful when the alarm he’d set on his travel clock goes off at six am so that he can get moving.

He showers, shaves, and dresses before going to check on Rey.

She’s not in her bedroom, and when he goes downstairs, he finds her in the kitchen, filling to travel mugs with coffee.  She hands him one, with an almost shy smile, her gaze still a little unfocused.  _Shy_.  After everything?  He takes a sip of the coffee to hide his frown.

“How’s the sight?” he asks her to say something.

“Blurry,” she says, and there’s a flush creeping up her cheeks now.  “You’re sort of this tall dark blob.”

“You’re not missing much,” he says, wishing his own voice didn’t sound oddly breathless.  He clears his throat.  “Shall we?”

“Yeah,” she says.

The sun is only starting to rise as he helps her into front seat of his car and Ben throws the thing in gear. 

“Grandine, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Rey says, and he takes a left at the end of the road.  It’ll be a forty-minute drive if not longer.  The roads are icy, and he doesn’t want to put Rey into the second car crash of the week, especially not when she actually should be seeing a doctor today.

It’s a steady quiet drive.  Rey sits there next to him, quietly drinking her coffee.  Ben gets the sense she’s waking up.  Or maybe from the way she’s looking out the window, she’s trying to see if her vision is clearing as the sun gets higher in the sky.

“I love this time of year,” she says quietly.  “I love the way the ice on the branches make the trees look sugar coated.”

Ben glances at them.  She’s right.  He’s never noticed that.

“Can you—” he begins, but she cuts him off.

“No, but I know it’s there,” she says, before repeating, “I love this time of year.”

“I’d have thought you’d hate the cold,” he says.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her make a face.  “No.  Nothing makes you like being a little too cold quite like growing up in Jakku.  If I’m never too hot again, it will be too soon.  Besides,” she smiles at him.  “It’s beautiful enough to make up for the cold.”

Ben’s never thought of it that way before and he says so, which makes Rey laugh lightly.  “Why am I not surprised.  You’re probably like Han that way—always grumbling about how annoying the snow is, and how cold it is.”

“We did rather share that opinion,” Ben says smiling.  He sort of likes being compared to his dad.  At least like this.  Sort of like when someone calls him a good driver.

The conversation is lazy, easy.  Rey tilts his second seat back and he turns on the seat warmer for her.  She clutches her travel mug in her hands and periodically sips from it until it’s empty and she settles it down on the ground by her feet.  The hour passes more quickly than Ben wants and it’s not long before Rey’s telling him to take a left, then a right, then just past the gas station, yup right here. 

The clinic is unassuming, and Ben gets out of the car and follows Rey closely into the waiting room.  He tells himself it’s because he’s worried that she’ll slip on the ice that he walks as closely as he does, that his gloved hand hovers near the small of her back as she pulls open the door to the clinic and goes to check in at the front desk.

It’s not a long wait before the medical assistant comes through and whisks Rey away.  “It hopefully won’t be too long,” she tells him, and he nods. 

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

Which is the truth.  He doesn’t.  Home would mean Uncle Luke and…

He doesn’t want to lie.  He’s afraid of lying—or rather, being caught in the lie.  He wants to keep Rey safe.  _She’s going to lose her insurance in a few months.  She needs insurance._

He doesn’t like where that takes his brain.  He doesn’t know much about MS, and he knows he’ll start researching it the second he gets back to the city and his computer, but—

He could use his phone.

He forgets, sometimes, that the dang thing has internet access.  At least—as long as it has a cellular connection.  For the most part, he uses it for emails, or scheduling, but not surfing the HoloNet.  Most people outside of work are only starting to get cell phones, much less shell out the credits necessary for one with all these business trappings.  He tugs it out of his coat pocket, where he’d put it quite by habit that morning and pauses.

He hadn’t really looked at it since he’d given it to Rey a few days before.  He certainly hasn’t had time to see the notification for the several thousand emails that are now sitting in his inbox, a little red _3,591_ popping up over the corner of the mail application.

_What the fuck is going on?_

A record high for his email count in one day had been just over five hundred.  He’s only been gone a few days. 

And he clicks into the email app.

_EMPIRE SITUATION PLEASE RESPOND_

_RESPONSE REQUIRED_

_SOLO, PLEASE CALL_

The last one was from Hux, and it made him see red.  He’s out on bereavement leave.  Hux _knows_ this. 

He calls.  “What the fuck, Hux,” he snaps the moment the man picks up the phone.

“Oh good, you finally checked your messages,” Hux says in a clipped tone.

“Checked my messages?  I’m out on bereavement, and gave you explicit—”

“The _Supreme Leader_ ,” Hux’s little joke name for Snoke, “Says that you need to come back into the office.  There’s an emergency in the Empire merger.  He needed you here yesterday.”

“Yesterday was my father’s funeral.” 

“Which means you can come back today.  It’s early enough that you can be here just after noon.”

“I have things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like sorting through my dad’s shit.  Like helping my mother and—and stepmother.”

“Oh right.  The divorce,” Hux drawls.  “I’d forgotten.”

“Of course you had,” Ben snarls into the phone. 

“Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell Snoke that you’ve gone rogue.”

“I’m not going rogue.  I’m on bereavement and an approved vacation.”

“Snoke can revoke his approval.”

“And I’ll file an HR complaint,” Ben says. 

“Really?  Against Snoke?  I find that unlikely.”

“Watch me,” Ben snaps and hangs up.

A moment later the phone is ringing.  It’s Hux again and Ben doesn’t pick up.  He pockets the phone, trembling, and it takes him another two minutes to remember why he’d taken it out.

Right.  Seeing if he can Holo up info about MS.

He takes a deep breath and takes his phone out of his pocket and right as he presses the button that should take him to the Net, his phone rings in his hand.

It’s Snoke.

 _Let it ring out,_ he can practically hear his mother telling him.  _You’re out of the office._

“Solo,” he says, picking up the phone.

“Hux tells me you finally got in contact,” Snoke says.  “I’m sorry once again for your father’s passing.  When will you be back?”

“I am taking the full week off,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Oh come now, surely you don’t need that much.  You’re not close to your family, as I understand it,” Snoke says.

“I’m taking the full week,” Ben repeats.

“We need you here,” Snoke says.  “The Empire merger is going up in smoke and I need you here to help make sure that doesn’t happen.  I don’t trust anyone half as much as you.  I’d been hoping to use this acquisition to finally get you the position you’ve deserved for so long.”

 _We need you here_.  Snoke had told him that how many times now? 

Somehow, he is sure, Snoke will get on just fine without him.  He remembers the feeling of Rey crying in his arms.

“Sir, I’m at a health clinic with my stepmother right now.  I’m very much needed here.  I’ll see you next week.”  And he hangs up the phone. 

 _I’m going to get fired_ , he thinks at once, but where once that would have sent fear shooting through him, that he would be free-falling once again, just like he was right after he’d dropped out of law school, he feels calm.  He looks around the waiting room and grabs a magazine from the coffee table.  It’s full of healthy living tips that almost make him laugh because he’s doing the exact opposite of what the article advises. 

His phone rings three more times while he waits for Rey to come back out, and every time it does, he feels his blood pressure go up.  _What don’t you get about bereavement leave?_ He thinks angrily as several different phone numbers from the office try to reach him.  _Or is HR policy only for people who don’t work in your immediate sphere?_

Rey comes out a few minutes later, a piece of paper clutched in her hand.  She has one of those smiles on her face—a brave smile, an _I’m ok_ smile, and Ben…Ben reaches for her hand and she takes it after waving farewell to the medical assistant who’d come out with her.

“Everything…” he doesn’t know what to ask.  Ok?  All right?  You’re not about to drop dead, right?  This didn’t make everything worse for you? Is he overreacting? 

“We need to stop by the drug store.  I have a new prescription they want to try me out on,” she says, shrugging.  “They gave me some steroid injections too, so hopefully this’ll clear up soon,” she sounds as though she’s forcing herself to be pleased by it.  Ben just wants to take her hand.  But she continues on, clearly unable to see the pained expression on his face.  “But on the whole, systems seem as normal as they can be, all things considered.”  She gives him a reassuring smile.  He hates that she has to reassure him.  Shouldn’t he be the one reassuring her?  She’s the one with the chronic illness.  That he knows nothing about.  Because when he’d tried look up information, to educate himself, he’d gotten called by work and let himself get distracted.  _You need to learn to control yourself, Ben.  You won’t get very far with that temperament of yours, and if you ever consider trying to be a judge, you’ll likely lose all backing with a temper like that._

_Fuck you too, Uncle Luke._

And his phone rings for a fourth time and Ben takes it out of his pocket and hurls it into the snow.

“What are you—” Rey begins.

“Fuck them.  Just fuck them,” he snarls, rounding on her but when he sees her face he stops dead.  “Sorry,” he mumbles, shame flooding him.

“What’s going on?” she asks slowly.  Not frightened.  His heart is pounding, but she’s not frightened.  She’s perplexed, and a little judgmental, but not frightened, and for the first time in nearly a day, her eyes seem to focus in on him.

“They keep calling me,” he mutters.  He lets go of her hand and goes to where he’d hurled the phone.  It’s still buzzing in the snow.  He picks it up and—probably a better move than what he’d done earlier—turns the damn thing off.

“Work?” Rey asks.

“Yeah.”

“They don’t know you’re out?”  She sounds indignant on his behalf.  It’s a relief. 

“Oh, they know,” he mutters darkly, and he opens the car door for her.   She gets in and he closes it, rounding the front of the car and getting in the driver’s side.  “They fucking know.”  He turns the car on and reverses out of the parking spot.  The sun is fully up now.  The ethereal dream that they’d been in driving to the clinic is fading.  Sort of like the break from reality he’d been in.

He’s going to get fired.  Or at least not put on this job that Snoke promised him after the merger.  Maybe he’ll get demoted.  Maybe he’ll get transferred, and not somewhere good.  He knows Snoke well enough to know that the man isn’t exactly above petty revenge for shit like this.

“Want to talk about it?” Rey asks him.  She’s tilted his second seat back a little bit and he can’t see her face, but her voice—

Well her voice reminds him a bit of his mom, but on her good days, the days when he knows that she won’t judge him for what he’s about to say, rather than the ones where she only ever seems to judge him.

“I hate my job,” he mutters. 

“So why do you still work there?” She asks, gently. 

“I just do,” he says.

“You can’t—”

“Look for another one?  Yeah, I could.  And easily.  But this one…”

He sighs.  From the second he opened his mouth, he should have known that talking about this was a bad idea.  There’s no way to really explain it, no way to make her understand while also feeling as though he’s not trashing a thing he wants.  “I want to grow in this arena.  I’ve put so much time and energy into learning it, and to just up and leave would feel like quitting.”

“It would be quitting,” Rey says.  “Is that such a bad thing?  If you get so mad that you throw your phone into the snow?”

They’ve reached stoplight—the only one in town—and he turns and glances at her.  She’s watching him, her head slightly tilted.  She’s wearing a blue hat with a pompom on it—he hadn’t really noticed that this morning, but he’d barely been awake this morning.

“You sound like my mother,” he mutters when he realizes he’s been staring at her.

“Stepmother privilege,” Rey teases.  “Got to break it out at some point. Although I suppose I never was a proper stepmother.”

“You married my dad, it counts,” Ben says, doing his best to ignore the voice in his head that’s demanding to know _why_ he’s insisting that she’s his stepmother.  _She’s younger than me, and she and my dad weren’t together.  Sister,_ the voice complains loudly.  Except today, sister doesn’t fit nearly as well as stepmother.  At least stepmother isn’t related to him, and he has now masturbated three times trying desperately not to think about her.

“It’s complicated,” he says at last.  “Sometimes things that aren’t what you want them to be are worth it if you know you’ll—” the light turns green and the car behind him honks and his head snaps to face the road again as he throws the car in gear. 

“If you’ll…” Rey prompts.

“If you know you’ll get what you want in the end.  And I do know I’ll get what I want.”

“What do you want?” Rey asks.

It’s such a simple question but it’s one that makes him freeze up because the first answer that comes into his head has nothing to do with work, or Snoke.  It’s also the most devastating thought he’s had in far too long.

_You._

His mind goes blank with panic and he focuses on the road again and pretends to be thinking as he does his best to settle the way his heart is panicking right now.  Because that fucking realization is clear as daylight—clearer than anything else he’s ever known in his life.  All the waffling around ever since he’d learned the truth, all the…

He doesn’t waffle.  He’s decisive, and clear about what he wants and how to get there.  He’s not the sort to live in denial.  Even with Snoke and work, it’s eyes wide open about what it is.  _I flipped out because they were trying to get me to leave early._

_To leave her._

But no—no that can’t be right.  It’s the stress of all this.  He can’t be afraid to leave his father’s widow behind.  Even if they weren’t really together.  Even if they weren’t really in love and she looks at him like he’s not a monster and—

 _Fuck_.

“Ben?” she asks, probably because he just made a face.  “You ok in there?”

“Never,” he replies, trying to sound as though he’s joking even as he sits there, totally winded. 

“Ben?” Rey’s laughing this time.  “Your face keeps doing things.”

He shakes his head slightly and this time, it clears.  _Focus_.  Because if there’s one thing he cannot do right now, not while he has to get ready to go lie to Luke, it’s even begin to entertain any reality in which he and Rey—

“I want to be my own boss,” he says at last.  “I want to be able to be in control of a scenario, or a major project.  I want to start my own business, maybe.  I want to just…do my thing.”

“Aren’t you an executive assistant?” He can tell she’s trying not to sound all _this makes no sense_.  Probably because she doesn’t have any idea.

“Hey—it’s more than just organizing schedules and travel,” he snaps defensively.  Yes, snapping is good.  Snapping means that he can hide the fact that he’s apparently getting too attached too fast.  Except he also never wants to be rude to her ever.  He wants her to like him.  And he just snapped.

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” Rey says at once.  “It’s just—”

“I sit in on meetings he can’t attend,” Ben says, “High level ones where he wants notes.  And I get to speak for him sometimes because he trusts my judgement.  I am cc’d on most of his emails for record keeping and am frequently the sounding board for any ideas that come through his brain.  I’m on call twenty-four-seven.  It’s not just…getting coffee.  It’s a tough job.”

“I’m sure it is,” Rey says, clearly trying to placate him.

“It’s not some shiny legal gig, but that’s my family’s fucking high horse on that front.  They think if you’re not going into law or public service you’re betraying the bullshit dream that the system can actually—”

He cuts himself off.  Yeah, the anger is probably good.  But he should save it for Uncle Luke later on, kick it up when he has to pretend he still doesn’t like Rey, doesn’t want her to get a penny of his father’s money. 

“It’s a good job,” he says at last.  “And it will help me get far.”  Rey makes a noise in the back of her throat.  “You don’t believe me?”

“Well, no,” she says.  “But that’s…” she doesn’t finish the sentence.

“That’s what?” he prompts her.  “Go on.”

“You sound like me when you say that,” she says at last.  “Or at least, me before all this.  Me when I would nod and smile my way through everything, would say it’s fine when it wasn’t fine because if I admitted to myself it wasn’t fine…”

“You’d break?”

“I’d get fucking livid.”  There’s a steel to her voice when she says it, and _god_ Ben needs to get a grip because his heart lurches in his chest and his cock twitches in his pants and his hands tighten on the steering wheel.  How is it that she can do this to him, just like that?  He’s dated before, he’s had women he’s cared about before—he doesn’t really think he was ever in love with them, but there was more than the average amount of care—but never, not _ever_ has he had his entire body react to someone this way, had his entire mind, his heart his—

“I used to bury it deep down,” she says quietly, and she tucks her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them—a childlike pose.  A vulnerable one.  His throat goes dry. 

Ben’s not the type of person that people get vulnerable around.  People are scared of him, or just think he doesn’t care.  Rey, though.  He’d held her while she’d cried yesterday, and now…

“I used to be all sunshine smiles to people who were nice to me because I thought if I was nice, if I was a good girl, my parents would come back for me.”  She snorts.  “That’s not how it works, unfortunately.  And even if they did come back for me now…” _She’s better off without them,_ his mother had said.  And Ben believes that.  Rey doesn’t deserve anyone who thinks she’s anything less than incredible.  “Anyway, I used to just get so angry all the time.  Whenever I’d see anyone treated wrong, or unfairly.  Didn’t matter what the scenario was, I’d just sort of leap into action.  But I kept telling myself I was ok, that this was normal behavior, that it—”

“It’s brave,” Ben tells her.

“It was.  It is.  I still do it, sometimes,” she says.  “But sometimes it’s braver to stand up for yourself and when you keep saying _it’s fine, it’s good_ you can’t really do that.  You don’t acknowledge the things that make you miserable.”

Ben blinks.

“That’s…”

“Crazy?”

“Wise, I was going to say.”

She blushes and he sees her fidgeting out of the corner of his eye.  God it’s a challenge to be able to talk to her and not look at her.  He wants to see her eyes right now.  He wants to see how it made her feel, what she’s thinking. 

“So you need to be brave, then,” he tells her at last.

“Oh please, we’re talking about you, not—”

“Because it’s _not_ fine that you’d be left high and dry, not fine that you get none of this money.  Not fine.  You’re not standing up for yourself.”

“God, you sound like Finn.  It’s _different_ ,” Rey says, sounding as though she’s failing wildly at being patient.  “I _am_ the injustice in this case.  I am—”

“You really think it’s your fault?” Ben asks.  “That my dad left you all that money?”

“It’s my fault he wasn’t still married to your mother, and that will—that _meant_ Leia Organa in every letter—isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”

“If there’s one thing I imagine you’d have learned about my mother at this point, it’s that she doesn’t do a damn thing she doesn’t want.  Ever.  Why the ever-loving fuck do you think that I was so upset by all of this?  Because you shtupped my dad?  No, it was because she didn’t seem to even give a fuck.  You’re _not_ the injustice.  Maybe my dad was an idiot who never updated his will, but he’d have left you something.  I know he would have.”

“This is fucking circles,” she snaps at him.

“Which is exactly what you’re telling me I’m doing.  Hmm, wonder if there’s a pattern going on.”

“Ok, smartass,” she mutters. 

Silence falls in the car which is fine by Ben.  He needs to calm down again, because he’s angry now.  Angry that Rey would ever feel like she couldn’t stand up for herself, angry that she’d think she was doing it when she wasn’t, angry that she’s in this situation to begin with, wishing her parents _were_ around so he could go and shout at them a lot…

“I just have moments,” she whispers so quietly that he thinks for a second that he’s imagining it, “where I can’t believe that this is real.  That this is—that I’m—you keep calling me family and I’m not.  I don’t have a family.  But I do.  But it feels like I cheated my way in through the back door, that I’m some charity case you’re donating time and money to because I’d be a wreck without it and I don’t deserve…”

She’s crying again.  Crying and rubbing her face with her hands and snuffling and Ben digs in the pocket of his coat for the packet of tissues he keeps there in winter and hands it to her.

“You do deserve it,” he says quietly. 

“You don’t know that. You’ve only known me for two days.”

“And yet I know it more clearly than I’ve known anything in my life,” he says earnestly, his heart thudding in his chest.  _You don’t want to leave her.  You don’t want to leave her.  You don’t want to leave her_. 

“How?” she whimpers as she blows her nose into a tissue.

“You ever get good feelings about people?” Ben asks her.  She blinks at him, and he continues.  “I don’t.  I never get good feelings about anyone.  I don’t trust people as far as I can spit.

“But I’ve got a good feeling about you.”

She blows her nose again and hands him back the tissue packet, her fingers brushing against his gloved hand and making him wish he’d taken them off to drive, fuck his hands getting cold, just so he could feel her skin against his. 

“I’ve got a good feeling about you, too,” she says quietly.

And his mind, his heart, his body, his soul—they do that thing again.

❖

The ride between the pharmacy and the house is silent, and Ben wishes he could think of something to say.  His heart is pounding in his chest, pure adrenaline—or so he tells himself.  It absolutely can’t have anything to do with the fact that Rey had grabbed a plastic pack of cotton underwear and bought them on their way out of the drug store and now he’s imagining her wearing blue and white striped bikini-sized cotton panties. 

Adrenaline.  Because that’s what happens every time he’s thought of Luke ever since he’d quit, ever since he’d dropped out.  _The hypocrisy,_ he thinks, choosing to focus on that.  _He’s a fucking hypocrite._

Luke’s car is parked in the driveway of his mother’s house.  Ben grabs Rey’s hand as she makes to get out of the car and she pauses.

“Hey,” he says quietly, desperately, “Whatever I say in there—it’s—the stuff I say to you is the real stuff, ok?”

She gives him a sardonic look.

“You’re awfully sweet sometimes, you know?”

“I mean it,” he plows on.  “I’m gonna be an asshole there. And I might say some stuff that—”

He can’t breathe, because she’s leaned forward and is kissing his cheek, her hand pressed to the side of his face, holding him there.  “You really are quite sweet sometimes,” she tells him.

And from her, he almost believes it.

She leans back, a slight flush to her cheeks.  “Better hope Luke wasn’t looking out the window.  Or else that’ll blow any act you have to pull out of the water.”  She’s not making eye contact with him.  In fact, she’s tucking her hair behind her ears and getting out of the car and he’s just sitting there like a statue because Rey kissed his cheek.

Ok.

He has to remember to breathe.

He gets out of the car and—out of habit, checks his phone.  It’s still off, which only reminds him of why he turned it off, which can only be a good thing because it gets him mad at work again.

 _You hate her,_ he tells himself.  _God, you hate her.  Keep it in your pants, Solo._

She’s already halfway up the walkway and he’s still standing there, staring at his turned off phone, trying to wrap his head around—

She kissed him.

Her lips on his face.  Inches from his own. 

She just—

_And Snoke wanted me to head back to the office today._

God, he’s going to fucking quit his job, isn’t he?  For himself, he still isn’t sure he could do it.  But if Rey thinks he can, thinks he _should_ …

It’s with that thought that he makes his way into the house and finds Rey has already hung up her coat and is hovering in the door to the kitchen.

“We dropped off a prescription,” she’s telling Leia, “They said it should be ready around three.”

“Everything OK?” Luke asks, with what Ben could only term as polite concern.

“Just the migraines again,” Rey lies smoothly.  “They wanted to try a new medication.” 

Ben takes a deep breath.  _Unreasonable,_ he reminds himself.  _You have to be as unreasonable as possible._

_You really are quite sweet sometimes._

“And Ben didn’t make your headaches worse?”

And there it goes. 

Ben kicks off his boots and takes off his coat, shoves it onto a hanger which he then clangs—loudly—on the rod in the closet before storming into the kitchen.

Remnants of breakfast are sitting on the kitchen table—an assortment of bagels, a bowl of freshly cut berries, coffee—and his mother is at the kitchen island with Luke, both of them looking down at some old photographs in one of the albums she usually keeps in the living room.  Rey is watching Ben closely—warily.  He hates that it’s warily, hates that she even has to pretend to be wary.

“Can we get this over with?” he snarls at no one in particular.

“Do you want anything to eat, Ben?” his mother asks carefully.  “You’re always in a better mood after you’ve—”

“I’m fine,” he snaps.  He is hungry, but he’s too nervous to eat right now.  He feels like if he puts anything in his mouth, he’ll keep chewing into eternity because he’s sure that he’ll vomit up anything he swallows right now.

“Let’s go into my office, then,” his mother says calmly.  “I don’t want you breaking any of my kitchenware.”

“I’m not going to—” Ben begins, but Luke is already walking into the study, his mother on his heels, shooting Ben a look over her shoulder.  Rey passes him too, squeezing his hand for little more than an instant but it’s enough, it’s something, he’ll take it.

Fuck he’s nervous.

They’re all purposefully not looking at him when he comes through the door.  He feels like a freak in a circus, feels like a monster.

So par for the course from home.

He’s trembling and shaking as he throws himself into the remaining chair, slouching down low and glaring at no one in particular.

“So as stands,” Luke says, “Rey—you stand to inherit all of Han’s worldly possessions, his business, his financial state.  You’re likely going to be appointed the executor of his estate, given the nature of his will, although it’s not out of the question that Ben,” Luke casts him a glance that makes Ben go cold.  _Unreasonable.  Hot-headed.  You need to get control of your emotions, think rationally, Ben,_ “might be named as well.  But you’re his widow, and you’re the only beneficiary in the will, so ultimately, whatever we come up with requires your sign-off.  In the event that we don’t come up with a solution today, or at least seem to be on the path to a solution—” though he’s not looking at Luke, he’s looking at his hands and the way they’ve balled themselves into fists, Ben knows he’s thrown a glance at Ben, “—I’m going to suggest, once again, that all parties involved retain counsel.”

“I don’t think we’ll need that,” Leia says easily.

“Don’t you?” Ben grumbles.

“Ben, don’t,” Leia intones right away.

“Oh please, don’t _don’t_ me,” he snaps at her.

She closes her eyes.  He can taste tin in his mouth—adrenaline.  He hates this.  He hates this so much.  Even if he knows that it’s not real, that it’s an act, it feels real.  It feels all too real.  It feels worse than it would feel if he didn’t know the truth.  Hell, it feels worse than it would have if what he’d thought had been the truth for the past five years _had_ been the truth.  At least then, he wouldn’t feel like he was walking into the fire.  He’d feel like he’d been dragged there and was fighting his way back out.

“Ok, then,” Luke says, his eyebrows slightly raised, his piercing blue eyes cool.  “Ben, what are you looking for?”

“She doesn’t get my dad’s shit.  There’s no way she gets it.  He was my dad, it should go to me.”

“Ben, she was married to your father for five—” Leia begins.

“Bull-fucking-shit with that,” Ben growls.  “It’s pure gold-digging and you know it.  She’s what? Fourteen?”

“I’m twenty-four, thank you very much,” Rey snaps at him and before Ben can respond, Leia is already talking over him, the way she always does when she’s trying to keep him from getting out of hand.

“He would have seen that she’d be provided for.” 

An argument that Ben’s made to Rey how many times in the past twenty-four hours.  And yet now, his reaction is, “Yeah, but he didn’t.  If it weren’t for some fucking drunken joke to him, he wouldn’t have had a will at all and then we’d be splitting things much more rationally, wouldn’t we?  But no—no, he’s Han ‘It’s not my fault’ Solo, who never made a goddamn plan in his life, so we don’t have that luxury.  I’ve known him longer than she’s been alive—you really think he wouldn’t have wanted me to have it?”

“Are you saying you want his business ventures?” Leia asks smoothly.

“I might,” Ben snaps.  “How would you know I wouldn’t?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time that he destroyed all modicum of principles and changed career tracks at the drop of a hat,” Luke says snidely.

“Oh fuck you,” Ben retorts at once.  “Don’t you pull that shit on me.  As if you get to pull that fucking holier than thou—”

“—Ben—”

“—hypocritical fucking _bullshit_.”

Luke’s eyes flash a warning, but Leia cuts in.  “Both of you knock it off.  Luke, you’re supposed to be maintaining neutrality.  Please, a little judicial temperament.  Ben.  Just—”

“Yeah, just,” Ben grumbles and he launches himself to his feet and goes and stares out the window.  He presses his palm against it, trying to let the glass cool his overheated skin.  His heart is pounding.  He hates all of this.  In glass’ reflection he finds Rey’s outline. 

She looks small.

She’s hunched her shoulders in, her hands are clasped on her lap—as though she’s trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible, as though she’s trying to make it like she doesn’t exist.

It makes him want to cry.  It makes him want to throw his fist through the glass.  _It’s an act,_ he tells himself. _It’s an act, it’s an act.  It’s not real.  She’s playing her part too._

Except she doesn’t think she deserves it.  She doesn’t think—

“Fine.  I don’t want his fucking business ventures.  She can keep it,” he snaps.  “Snoke’s going to give me a big promotion soon anyway.  Ain’t got nothing on whatever fucking small-time crime dad had a monopoly on.”

“Ben,” his mother intones for the trillionth time in his life.  And no, slightly softer _come on, kid_ to follow it.  No ruffle of his father’s hand through his hair.  No nothing.  Just Luke’s cold gaze and Rey’s trying to make herself too small.

And fuck whatever the fuck his mother thought was a good idea.  He’s fucking out.

“You know what?” he snaps.  “I already know how this is going to go.”  And he rounds on his mother.  “You’re going to make me feel unreasonable for wanting what I deserve, so you know what?  You work out what you think is reasonable and leave me the fuck out of it.  That’s where we’ll end up anyway.  Wherever you think is reasonable, you manipulative bitch.”

And he storms out of the study, slamming the door behind him so hard that the house seems to shake around him.  He’s trembling and gasping and running up the stairs and throwing himself onto his bed because that’s what he always does when everything’s terrible.  He slams doors and breaks things and why does it never get better, even when he thinks it’s getting better?  Why does it never get better?

 _They’ll hate me for that,_ he thinks as yells into his pillow.  _They’ll hate me.  They’ll think I meant it and hate me._

Worst of all—he hates himself more than a little right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Grandine System](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Grandine_system)


	4. Chapter 4

A minute, an hour, a day later, there’s a soft knock on his bedroom door.

Not his mom, this time.  She doesn’t knock like that, three times and leaving her knuckles against the door after the last knock. 

It’s Rey.

He tries to make a noise with his throat, but it’s too locked up to work.  But she comes in anyway after just a moment, closing the door behind her. 

“Ben?” she asks him.

He tries to make that noise again, and this time he’s a little more successful.  She crosses the room and settles down on the bed next to him, running her hand up and down his back.  “Are you ok?”

He shakes his head.  He’s still shaking.

She doesn’t say a word, she just leans down on the bed next to him—the exact way that he’d done yesterday—and presses herself against his back, holding him to her chest. 

“It’s all right,” she murmurs.  “It’s all right.”

“It’s not,” he chokes out.  “But it’s nice of you to say.” 

Rey’s arms tighten around him.  “Your mother and I were able to put on a good show of talking out what we thought would be the best way to talk to you, and Luke seemed to believe it.  He—”

Ben just starts to shake his head.  He doesn’t want to think about it.  He doesn’t want to hear about it.  He just yelled at his mom, called her a bitch, and dad would hate him for that because the one thing that always got dad mad was when Ben said something nasty about mom.  But dad won’t get mad, now.  Dad’s gone.  Dead.  The only thing Ben has left of him are his dice.

The dice that mom had left for him when he’d first gotten here.

“I should go apologize,” he mutters.

“You don’t have to,” Rey says.  “Honestly—we knew you didn’t—”

“I should—” He makes to sit up.

“Ben, stop.”

“I called her a bitch.”

“Ben.”  Rey’s hand is viselike on his arm right now and he turns to look at her.  He feels so thoroughly miserable.  More miserable even than he felt before he’d known the truth, more miserable than he’d felt in the car the other day with mom, more miserable than he remembers feeling in a very long time.

She’s staring at him and under her gaze, he collapses backwards, onto the bed again.  Rey’s hand travels up and down his spine again. 

“It felt so natural,” he says at last.  “It felt so normal.  And that’s what I always hated about it—how natural it felt.  How easy it was to just let it all wash over me and to drown in it.”  Rey keeps rubbing his back.  It’s soothing.  It’s gentle.  It’s everything Ben never is.

Except yesterday.

And that had also felt normal.  Felt natural.

“Thank you,” she says at last.  “For doing that for me.” 

He wonders if she’s going to try and kiss his cheek again.  Pitifully, he hopes she will.  He doesn’t feel particularly heroic right now.  He feels pretty pathetic right now, actually. 

“You knew your parents didn’t give a shit about you,” he mumbles into his pillow.  “I—I thought they were only pretending to like me for the longest time.  Especially Uncle Luke, especially after I interned for him.  Dad was the only one who—” Who made it feel natural.  Maybe because his dad was a bit of a fuckup too.

“They love you,” she says.

“Yeah,” he replies.  “I know.  But it didn’t always feel that way, you know?  It felt like knives in the wounds, all the damn time.  One more way I wasn’t their perfect prince.  But I know mom loves me.”  His fist tightens on the bed next to him.  “She gives me my dad’s dice, and I call her a bitch.  Seems like a great way to thank her.”

Rey is quiet for a moment.  He doesn’t really expect her to reply.  _Do you really think she is a bitch?_ is the question she’s not asking, the one she’s afraid to ask because the answer—well, how easily he’d done it.  How easily.  God he’s a fucking piece of shit and—

“I left you the dice,” Rey says quietly and his heart fucking stops in his chest.  “He mentioned you always liked them.  I don’t remember when.  And there’s that picture of you with them in the living room.  They didn’t talk about you much.  You hurt.  So I just remembered little things about you.  Like that you always liked the dice.  Leia said you’d appreciate it.”

Ben lifts his head off the pillow and stares at Rey.  She looks tired, and a little sad.  Her lips spread out and down slightly in what seems to be a failed attempt at a smile. 

“Thanks,” Ben mumbles.  “I—thanks.”

“Of course,” Rey says. 

“She’s not mad at you,” Rey says.  “I promise—she’s not.”  She pauses.  “But I know it’ll feel that way.  It’s how I feel, too, whenever I do something that reminds me of why I think I’m worthless.”

She snuggles down next to him the way she did yesterday. 

Yesterday.

God he’s only known her for two days.  How does it feel like he’s known her his whole life?  Her soul is brighter than the fucking sun, and it’s made him forget everything he was, everything he thought he was, everything he has been.   It’s all gone—shattered and broken, turned to dust.  He feels like someone entirely different when he’s around her—someone he likes far more than he’s ever liked himself.

“You’re braver than you give yourself credit for, and loved more than you think you are,” she tells him.

“So are you,” he replies.  

That she doesn’t try to tell him that’s not true means more than he knows how to say.

❖

When he goes downstairs at last, Luke is still there, which frustrates him, but mostly he is just too exhausted.  At least it doesn’t look like he’d spent a good chunk of time crying.  At least that much is no longer evident in his face.

“Sorry about earlier,” he says to his mother.  Not to Luke.  He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what Luke thinks of him.

Leia gives him a significant look and says.  “Sweetheart, I know it’s hard.”  She holds out a hand and Ben takes it. 

“I’m going to the pharmacy,” Rey says behind him.  “For my migraine meds.”

“Are you ok to drive?” The words slip out of him before he remembers he’s supposed to hate Rey when Luke’s around.  Luckily, she has more wherewithal than he does. 

“I can drive perfectly fine, thank you very much,” she says a little snidely.

It’s enough for him to recover.  “Fine, but I found you crying in a snow bank two days ago.”

“Children, please,” Leia says, trying to sound long-suffering.

“Oh, as if you could do better with the ice on the road,” Rey retorts.

“I seem to recall not ending up in a snowbank.”

“As if you don’t want me dead and all this over.”

“Maybe I do,” he retorts.  “Fine.  Go drive,” and he throws himself into the kitchen chair, brooding about how much he hates this and deciding to blame it all on Uncle Luke and his hypocrisies and the _ethical necessities_ of his job or whatever he would say.

He thinks that’s the end of it except Rey comes back a few minutes later.  “The car won’t start,” she says.  “I’ll take a look at it later but—”

Ben gets up without a word and a moment later he’s marching out to his car.

“I’ve never known Chewie to fuck up a car,” Ben says, casting a glance at Rey’s sedan where it’s parked innocently in the driveway.

“Oh, I lied about that,” Rey shrugged.  “I got out to the car and realized you probably didn’t want to have to sit in a room with Luke longer than you absolutely had to.”

Ben stops short for just a moment before smiling.  “Besides,” she continues as they get into the car, “I figure at some point you’re going to let me drive this thing.”  Her eyes are on his gearshift with his six gears, and Ben smirks as he throws the car in reverse and pulls away from the house.  “Can you really afford that on an EA’s salary?”  She sounds almost wistful.

“Wage,” he replies.  “It’s an hourly role.  Salary is a flat rate for the year.  And yeah—the time and a half overtime pay is pretty good when Snoke owns your soul.”  The words turn stale in his mouth.  He’d never cared about it much before.  Why should he.  Most of his—well, he wouldn’t call them friends, because he doesn’t really _have_ friends, but the people he spends time with—they work for FO too.  He doesn’t have anyone who he’d want to give his extra time to. 

He casts a sideways glance at Rey. 

“You must work a lot of overtime,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.  “On average.”

“They must be going nuts without you.  Is that why they called you this morning?”

Ben snorts.  “Yeah.  Can’t function much without me.  I’m a linchpin.”

“You are,” she agrees, but the way she says it—

“Don’t go turning it into something I didn’t mean, ok?”

“Your parents love you, you know,” she says.  Present tense, even though dad’s dead, but he doesn’t have the heart to correct her.  “I do think you were a linchpin for the family.  They made it sound like things fell apart.”

“They fell apart long before they decided to go and commit fraud,” he says.  “They fell apart the second I stopped looking at Uncle Luke—my parents’ _best friend_ and brother, the one who got them together, and all that garbage—with stars in my eyes.”

Rey frowns.  “They never were particularly clear on why you—”

“Because I never told them,” he cuts her off as they pull into the parking lot in front of the pharmacy.  “Because chances are they’d say _what’s the big deal_ and at that point in my life, I was tired of being treated like my big deals weren’t big deals.”

“What happened?” Rey asks quietly.  She hasn’t moved to get out of the car.  She’s looking at him with those eyes of hers, the one that blaze, and cry, and look at him like he’s sweet sometimes.

He takes a deep breath.  “Ok, let’s say you’re me,” he begins.  She makes a face and it takes him longer than it should to realize she’s imitating his scowl.  “Shut up.”  She grins.  “You’ve spent your life drinking from whatever your mother has been drinking.  You have stars in your eyes about what it is the legal system is, can do, can provide.  Your mom’s a senator.  Your dad’s a businessman—let’s not say what he does, you know it’s shady and definitely illegal.  But you love him, and he and mom make it work.

“And your uncle’s a _judge_.  He’s the epitome of honor and judgement and balance.  He’s supposed to always be measured, logical, detached.  But he’s always got a twinkle in his eye for you.”

Rey nods along, which Ben finds more than a little comforting.  He continues. 

“You go to college—a good one, probably because you’re a senator’s son.  Then you go straight to law school, a good one, too, because you know you want to be a lawyer, a senator, maybe even a judge too.  It’s in your blood.  It’s destiny.

“But law school isn’t really what you want it to be.  Maybe it’s because it’s the first time you’re really doing it, or maybe it’s because it’s just not right for you, or maybe it’s because you’ve only ever tried to be what your parents wanted you to be that you never took the time to work out what you were—whatever.  Doesn’t matter.  But what does matter is that it’s not what you want it to be.

“You get an internship working for your uncle.  You know nepotism isn’t how things are supposed to go, but you genuinely trust Uncle Luke to have been measured in hiring you.  After all—he’s a judge.”

“I feel like I know where this is going,” Rey says quietly.

“No,” he says.  “You really don’t.  You spend the summer interning for him.  You’re not a clerk—you haven’t been admitted to the Bar yet, you’ve only done one year of your JD.  But you’re watching him take cases, watching him chew through legal philosophies with the clerks.  You learn a lot.  And see a lot.

“And then one day, he weighs in on this criminal trial.  Nothing new, that’s his job, after all.  Except that it’s a smuggling case, tied to a larger trafficking one, and the guy on the stand—well, he does exactly what your dad does. 

“Your uncle knows what your dad does.  He’s known it for years.  All these hoops you’ve had to jump through to pretend my parents aren’t committing fraud to help you—that’s not something my uncle’s ever made Han Solo do before.  He was grandfathered in, you see.  Luke knew him before he was a lawyer, before he was a judge, and he wasn’t going to let his best friend go.  But there he is, giving a decision that, if it were your dad on the stand, he’d be fucked by.  Really fucking fucked by.”

Ben takes a deep breath.  So is she gonna think it’s him overreacting, just like Luke, just like his mom?  Is the dream of all this about to shatter into a million pieces by.  “So you confront him about it.  And he tells you that you have to detach your emotions, that the law is the law, and what’s right is what’s right, and that he’d never be able to try a case with my father because they’re related but that he stands by his decision.

“And maybe he should have.  I don’t know.  I’m not a fucking judge and never will be, but he made me feel like it was unreasonable to say that that could have been my _dad_.  He can compartmentalize and I can’t.”

“So you quit?” Rey asks.

“So I quit.  He made some comments about how this might be the right thing—that I never had the temperament,” he snorts, “to be a good lawyer.  A bully lawyer, maybe, but not one that makes the world a better place.  Should have seen it coming then.”

“Seen what coming?” Rey asks.

“You should have heard him when I took my job with Snoke,” he says darkly.  “Met him at a networking event in law school.  He wanted me for his legal team, but when I reached out about another gig, he found me one.  And First Order is not serving the public by any stretch of the imagination.  We have a whole marketing team devoted to trying to convince people that we are, but we’re not.  I know that, and maybe I just don’t care.  When you spend too long thinking about how best to serve and then suddenly the service is…” he doesn’t know how to say it.  He doesn’t think he has to because he sees Rey nodding.

He takes a deep breath.  “Anyway, my mom hated it.  My dad didn’t understand why I wanted it.  And Luke—he ripped into me.  Again and again.  Said that the First Order was destroying the country, that there was a darkness there that I could never come back from, that if I couldn’t take consolation in the ethical grey areas of engaging with the law, I shouldn’t sell my soul to a demon like Snoke.”

He swallows.  “I don’t think, technically, he said anything my parents weren’t thinking.  But it was degrees of magnitude.  My mother still seemed to respect my decision, even if she hated it, even if she’d spend the next year of my life trying to convince me to find something else.  But Luke went for the jugular and I could tell that…well…you’ve been here.  Do you think he respects me?”

Rey doesn’t say anything.  He hears her inhale and exhale, and with every breath he takes, he feels disappointment sinking through his gut.  And he can’t stop himself. “You spend your whole thinking that everyone’s lying about loving you and then your uncle goes and proves it sort of.  And—and I don’t know.  But it’s not—“ he takes a deep breath.  He feels like a whiney little boy again.  He hates that.  That crushing weight of his uncle’s judgment and every time he tries to talk about it, he feels like there aren’t words he could string together to not make him sound like a whiney boy.

He pulls into the parking spot outside the drug store and turns off the car.  “You think I overreacted,” he says, preparing himself deep down in his heart for the breaking that’s about to happen.

“No,” she says slowly.  “Well, yes, maybe.  Not about your uncle, though.”

Ben blinks at her as she passes him and makes her way into the drug store. 

“Yeah?”

She turns to look at him over her shoulder.  “He’s been very snide about you.  It’s like he thinks you’re gone.  Like you sold your soul, or whatever it is that you just said.  But goodness is more complex than that, and I’d think that he’d know that—“ and then, with a frown, and a judgmental noise in the back of her throat, “Especially as your uncle.  You’d think he’d allow that maybe you’re a better person, rather than a worse one.”

Ben almost sags at her words.  He hadn’t realized that he hadn’t been breathing right until this moment, when air floods into his lungs.  How is it that Rey makes him breathe?

Ben hovers a few feet back from her as she picks up her prescription.  They pick up some toilet paper for the house, as well as some dish soap because Rey says they’re running low, and then get back in the car.

“But, I suppose, if he was the one of reasons you wanted to be a lawyer and then that was gone, then it’s as good a reason as any to drop out,” she says at last.  Ben gives her a look.  He hadn’t realized they were still talking about this—distracted as he had been by the varieties of dish soap that were available, and Rey wondering if they should also pick up laundry detergent because it hadn’t occurred to them that morning when they’d stopped by.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” she replies. 

“But you still think I shouldn’t have quit.”

“I think you don’t like where you are now,” she says.  “So I don’t necessarily think you shouldn’t have quit law, but I don’t think you should be where you’ve landed.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time—”

“I spent a lot of time waiting for my parents,” Rey cuts him off.  “And yeah, it’s different.  But it’s also not.  Because after a certain point, you sit there and the main reason you’re still doing something that makes you miserable is that you’ve spent a lot of time doing it.  And that’s not a reason to keep on doing it.”

Ben doesn’t even begin to know what to say to that so he just stares at the road.  Sometimes it feels like she’s defending him from himself.

Which is ironic, given that that’s sometimes how he feels when he’s talking to her.

It’s starting to get dark, but that’s winter in the north for you—dark just before four pm.  The last thing he wants to do right now is crash his car into a snowbank because he didn’t see some ice.

They make it back to the house safely, and he’s relieved that Luke’s car is gone when he pulls up. 

Rey goes upstairs immediately upon making it into the house, and Ben goes into his mom’s study, where she’s sitting there with a cup of tea, listening to some jazz on the radio.  “About earlier,” he begins when she looks up.

“It was a bad idea, and I’m sorry to have put you through that,” his mother says and he pauses, surprised.  She rolls her eyes.  “Do you really think that I couldn’t tell you were actually upset?  I’m so sorry, Ben.”  She gets up and wraps her arms around him.  Once, she’d been bigger than him when they’d hugged, but Ben barely remembers that.  That was more than half his life ago.  Now, her arms are around his middle, and his are around her shoulders and he lets himself sort of droop down onto her.

_Is this really the first hug we’ve had since Dad died?_

She’d hugged him that first day, and had they hugged in the car?  But this one—this one feels like the real hug.  The one where they’re both feeling things, where they’re both sorry and taking solace in one another, the one where they don’t want to let go.

“We should talk,” she says quietly.  “About what makes sense for Rey and what you get.”

“Yeah,” Ben agrees.  Part of him just wants all of it to go to Rey, but he also knows that that’s not the right solution.  “Yeah, we should talk.”

So they do.

❖

By the time that they’re done hashing out details, it’s pitch black outside.  They leave Leia’s study to find Rey heating up more of Maz’s leftovers in the kitchen. 

“It would probably be good to start squaring away some of his things,” Leia says and Ben gives her a look.

“We can wait until tomorrow for that, can’t we?” he asks.

“Your father has a lot of junk.  He’s a hoarder.  Was,” she corrects and it’s like a little light leaves her eyes.  She sets herself to her food and Ben glances at Rey.

“We can tackle some of the basement things,” Rey says.  “You can rest.”

“You should be the one resting,” Leia says at once.

“I’m fine,” Rey says firmly.  “Honestly, I am.  And if I get tired, Ben will take care of it.”

They finish dinner quickly, and for the first time—possibly ever in his life, but certainly since he had gotten home—his mother disappears up the stairs and leaves them to clean up after the meal.  

“She needs to rest,” Rey says as they put the dishes in the dishwasher and put the leftovers back in containers.  “She hasn’t rested, she hasn’t been eating.  She’s trying to do that thing where she takes care of people but forgets to take care of herself.”

“She’s good at throwing herself in front of the bus to take the hit for others,” Ben says slowly.  “And not as good at making sure she’s ok when the bus is gone.”

Rey nods.  “When you go back,” she says slowly.  “Please—I know you’re not planning to disappear forever again but please call.  Sometimes.  I can help her, but I’m not her son.”

He nods, and her eyes go bright, and she turns away from him to put the last of the plates in the dishwasher.

By the time they’re done cleaning up, Rey’s got this determined look on her face.  “Basement?”

Ben groans.  “Yeah.  Yeah, let’s start with the basement.”

It smells like dad and dust downstairs as they make their way down the rickety staircase and turn on the lights.  The rafters have spiderwebs on them, and the exposed bulb looks like it might die on them at any moment.  There are boxes—everywhere.   Some of them are labeled in his dad’s messy handwriting, but most of them aren’t.  _Han, you should just get rid of it so we don’t have to clean it up when you die,_ he remembers his mother chiding his father sometime in high school when Han had come back from a run with a box full of fishing tackle.  It would be useful, one day, he had claimed, despite never having gone fishing in his entire life.  But his dad was a bit of a pack rat.  His mother had always thought it was because he’d grown up without anything at all.

“Where do we start?” Rey asks.

“I guess here?” Ben says, jerking his head to the nearest, teetering stack of boxes.  “Closest to the door.”

“And I thought I was bad,” Rey mutters as she crouches down to look at the closest box. It’s unlabeled. 

“You’re a pack rat too?”

“Scavenger, mostly,” Rey replies.  “I like finding things and keeping them.  You never know what you’ll need, or what you can sell.  Do you think it’s worth trying to get Leia to do a yard sale for a lot of this?  Someone might buy it.”

“In summer, maybe,” Ben says, opening the top box.  Oil lamps, somehow?  Good lord.  “No one’s going to come to a yard sale in winter.”

“True,” Rey sighs.  “Might still be worth hanging onto some of it.  We can do all the sorting and labeling now so we don’t have to worry about doing it again.”

“When do you think these were made?” Ben asks, showing her the oil lamps.

“I have no idea.”

“Might be worth bringing to an antique shop or something.”

Rey frowns.  “I suppose.”

And so it goes.  They make their way through two boxes of odds and ends before deciding that it’s not worth trying to identify the things of value if it’s not immediately evident.  That’s a sure-fire way to end up without making any progress at all. 

“Your mom won’t want any of this, right?”

“Nah.  If it ended up in the basement, then she doesn’t want to think about it ever again,” he says. 

“So these home videos?” Rey asks and Ben goes still.

He remembers that camcorder.  His dad had taken it to sports games of his in high school, insisting on filming them.  _You’ll never want to watch them again,_ Ben had complained.

 _Maybe not, but I’d prefer to have them and let them gather dust than lose the memory forever,_ his dad had insisted.

Ben swallows.

“I guess mom might want them,” he mumbles, looking away from her.   “We can ask.”

“Ben?” Rey asks.

“Yeah?”

“He took videos of you, yeah.  Doing son things?”

Ben nods.  He’s got this annoying lump in his throat.

“Baseball games and stuff.”

“What position did you play?” Rey asks.

“Short stop.  But mostly I was good at hitting.  I was a power hitter for my high school.”

“I want to see,” Rey says with delight, grabbing a video from the top of the stack and making her way across the basement.

There’s an old TV down here, in the corner, with a VCR and she fiddles for just a moment with the tape before sticking it into the VCR.

“Were you good?” Rey asks as she turns on the TV and waits for the VCR to start playing the tape.

Ben feels his ears start to heat up.  “Yeah, I was—”

But that’s not him playing baseball on the screen.

It takes him a moment to realize what he’s watching.  Yes, he’s seen porn before.  Hell, he’s even rented some amateur home porn before, so he’s really aware of what this is.

But this—

“ _Han_ ,” his mother—

Oh god—

No—

He—

Rey seems to realize what’s happening a just the same time as him and they’re both lurching for the TV, the VCR, the _anything_ , trying not to pay attention to his mothers breasts on the television in front of them and—no no no no no no he doesn’t want—that’s his dad’s—

The TV goes blank, the VCR turns off and for a moment, he thinks everything’s over, if not all right.

Then the TV starts to fall backwards, the pressure of two people desperately trying to turn it off knocking it off balance and he hears Rey shout “Oh no!” and they both stumble forward hands out stretched but not fast enough to prevent the horrible crunching noise that fills the basement as the television crashes to the ground.

Which is exactly the same moment that the light gives out.

And Rey crashes into him, her face pressed against his chest, and they both tumble to the ground, landing with a hard smack against the concrete floor.  An electric jolt shoots up Ben’s ass when it connects but it’s the fact that Rey’s hand is on his hip, brushing against his leg, against his—

His—

That’s what makes it really feel like electricity.

“You ok?” he asks her.

“Ow,” she manages.  “Knees.”

“Hang on,” Ben says.

It’s pitch black now.  And suddenly everything is louder, the way they’re both breathing, the way his heart is going.  The only thing that could have blown the mental image of his mother’s tits bouncing like that while he camera is angled to cut off her face but include his dad sliding in and out of her—nothing except Rey’s hand right by his groin.

 _Hang on,_ he’d said, but he can’t bring himself to move.  Not even a little bit.  Not at all.

She can’t realize how close her hand is, right?  Surely she’d have pulled it away.  

She’s shifting now, slightly, but between the stacks of boxes—

“Hang on,” Ben says again.

“What?”

“Glass—you heard that crunch—I don’t want you to—”

“We should both get up then,” she says.

“Are you wearing shoes?”  He hadn’t even been paying attention when they’d come downstairs. 

She snorts.  “I’m not going to descend into your father’s trove without shoes.  I don’t wan to come away with tetanus.”

“Just checking.”

“Here, take my hand,” she says, and he does.  Her hand is warm, and small, and the skin isn’t soft, it’s calloused, and rough, and he’s fine with that, he really is, because it’s her hand, it’s the her that’s the important part.  Somehow, awkwardly in the pitch black, they pull one another to their feet.  She’s standing so close he can feel the warmth of her rolling off her.  He can hear her breath, can imagine every line of her body in the darkness.

How can the darkness feel this bright?  He’s alive with how close she is.

She pulls away, and he hears her making her way through the stacked boxes towards the stairs, which she climbs and opens the door.  He sees her there, illuminated by the light from the kitchen, almost blindingly bright. 

_She’s so beautiful._

Something catches her attention and she disappears from sight and slowly, Ben’s heart rate steadies.

Slowly, everything that just happened hits him.

_Ok, so we’re not seeing what any of those videos are.  Straight in the garbage they go._

Unless his mom wants them for some reason.

_Hey mom, we found your and dad’s home porn.  So if you want to keep any of it before we burn it…oh and we broke the TV in the basement in our horror, so if you want to watch it, it had better be on the one in the living room._

And then Rey’s hand had been an inch from his groin and his mind does a wholly unhelpful thing and wonders what it would have been like if she’d been gripping it fully.  She’s seen it, after all.  And he has never really thought much about his penis—probably because he has never in his life wanted someone as much as he wants Rey—but he’s not got a bad penis?  He thinks?

That’s the thought that makes him move towards the stairs.  He’ll find a lightbulb for that ceiling light and see how bad the glass is on the floor and then he and Rey will pretend they never saw what they saw, they’ll bleach it from their memories and pretend it didn’t happen.

“—he’s been all right.  Really,” he hears Rey say and he freezes.  If she’d been listening, she’ll have heard him on the creaky stairs up from the basement, but she doesn’t seem to have been paying much attention because she keeps going.  “He’s been sweet about it, I promise.  He took me to my appointment earlier today, and we’re working on going through some of Han’s stuff now.”

“You need any help?”

He’s never heard that voice before in his life, a low male voice.  Immediately, he feels warm.  _Who is that?_

“No, I mean—I might after he leaves, but it should be fine.  Leia’s going to be a lot to manage and—”

“I mean, yeah, but I’m asking about you, Rey.  Are you going to be ok?”

“I’m going to be—”

“Don’t say fine.  You are pretending so hard right now.”

“And what good does it do not to pretend?  Especially because Leia and Ben say that they’ll make sure I’m not alone, that I’ll be...that I’ll…”

She sounds like she’s about to cry and Ben can’t stand for that so he keeps climbing the stairs and rounds the corner that’ll take him to the front door where Rey is standing there, talking to the black man she’d hugged at the funeral—Finn.

And immediately he feels ashamed of whatever the fuck beginnings of jealousy he’d been feeling.  _She has a life._

_You aren’t a part of it._

“Hi,” Finn says the moment he catches sight of Ben.  He waves slightly and Ben steps forward, extending his own to shake it.  Finn’s grip is firm.

“Hi,” he replies.

“Finn, Ben.  Ben, Finn,” Rey says by way of introduction.  Finn gives him the sort of smile that screams _Oh, so you finally show up, fucko._

“Nice to meet you,” Ben says.  It’s kind of exactly the cold shower he needs, all things considered. 

“And you,” Finn says.

“Finn stopped by to check in,” Rey says.  “Since I wasn’t at the wake yesterday.  It’s been busy,” she says and she gives Finn a smile.

“Hopefully it’ll start to settle soon?” Finn says.

“That’s the hope,” Rey replies. 

“Is that Finn I hear?” comes Leia’s voice from upstairs.

“Hi, Senator,” Finn calls and Ben’s mother appears at the top of the stairs, a smile on her face.

“Aren’t you always a sight for sore eyes,” she says, giving him a one-armed hug when she reaches the bottom.  “Is Poe here?”

“He is not, but I can summon him if you’d—”

“No, that’s fine,” Leia says, shrugging.  “Just thought the company would be nice, but I won’t drag him out of his life.”

They make their way into the living room, and Ben makes everyone a drink—which Rey forgoes—and there’s laughter and stories.  And at first, it is nice.  It’s very nice, until Ben’s on his third glass of whiskey and realizing that that thought—that errant, passing thought he’d had while Rey had talked to Finn—was taking root.

_She has a life._

_You aren’t a part of it._

So he drinks, which it turns out, only makes it worse, because the more that Finn makes Rey laugh, the more he remembers that—even if they’re just friends, and god he’s glad she has a friend like Finn who can make her laugh her lovely laugh—he’s permanent; Ben’s temporary.

His hand tightens on the glass as he empties it and stands to get himself a fourth, swaying slightly.  His feet are heavy as he moves, his movements a little jerky and when he opens the whiskey bottle it slips from his hand and shatters on the ground.

“Fuck,” he shouts, and the room goes still.

“Did you cut yourself?” Rey asks and she’s there right next to him, taking his hand and examining it.

“No, I’m fine,” he says.  “Just a bad grip.”

Finn appears next to Rey, holding a bunch of paper towels and the three of them bend down to mop up the sizable amount of whiskey that’s now spreading its way across the hardwood floor.

His mother appears with a wet towel and he takes it from her to clean up the glass shards.

“Sorry about the whiskey,” he says to her as he puts the glass shards in the waste bin she’s holding out.

“Oh, you know I don’t like whiskey,” she says.  “That was your father’s.”

Of course it was. 

She sighs.  “I was planning on sending it home with you anyway.”

Ben nods and stands and looks around.

He wants to be alone again, now.  His head’s not happy, and there’s no more whiskey to take the sting off that.  Indeed, more whiskey might make it worse.

He wants quiet, and dark, and a safe place to mope where he doesn’t have to worry that his moping might make Rey stop smiling.  So he takes himself upstairs and flops on his bed and stares at the ceiling and waits for things to stop feeling sucky again.

At some point, much later, Finn’s car drives off.  He hears his mother come upstairs for bed, and a little while later, he hears Rey creeping along quietly, avoiding—catlike—the creaky floorboards in an effort to keep people from waking.

He hears her pause outside his bedroom door for just a moment, and he stops breathing. 

She doesn’t come in though.  She doesn’t knock.  She stays there for a full thirty seconds, as though waiting on a precipice before continuing down the hallway to her bedroom.

❖

Sleep doesn’t come, and at about three in the morning, Ben goes downstairs to stretch his legs, get himself a glass of water, be in a different space.  The house is still.  The wind outside blows deep whorls through the woods, and he knows that snow is probably swirling in a perfectly picturesque sort of way. 

He finishes his glass of water, then drinks down another one because his head is sort of hurting before going back upstairs.

The light is on in Rey’s bedroom when he passes it this time and now it’s his turn to pause outside her bedroom door.

Only he knocks—softly, but enough that it sounds like a gong is ringing through the silent house.

“Come in,” he hears Rey say and he opens the door.  She’s sitting on her bed in a ratty t-shirt a journal in her hand.  Her eyes are a bit red like she’s been crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says.  He raises his eyebrows and she rolls her eyes.  “I suppose there was no way to get away with that.”

“Not a chance,” he replies evenly.  He crosses and sits down on the bed next to her. 

“Just…everything,” she replies.  “Everything’s wrong.  Everything’s wrong and I hate that.  And I can’t even say, _oh, I’ll just take over Han’s job_ because he was the job.  Chewie would help, but I now he’s been wanting to retire for years now, so I won’t make him stick around while I flail around like a puppy learning how to walk.  And besides, Han’s clients wouldn’t trust me and trust…trust’s needed in his line of work.”

“I’m fairly certain his clients didn’t trust _him_ ,” Ben says a little dryly, before saying, “Sorry,” when he sees Rey look away, biting back her own frustration.

“Well, if they only barely trusted him, they certainly aren’t going to trust me,” Rey says.  “Can we at least agree on that?”

“Yes,” Ben says at once.  “We can definitely agree on that.”

Rey leans back against the wall.  “Most of the jobs I could do locally are ones that are more part time than full time.  They’re the ones I _have_ been doing for the past few years.  But that’s not going to make anything easier when—when—”

“Hey,” he says as she starts to cry again.  “Hey,” and he pulls her close and she’s crying into his shoulder.

“And you’re about to go away,” she says.  “You’ll be gone again in a few days, and then what?  You’ve made everything feel _better_ for just a moment.  Like you can help me hold reality at bay, and then you’ll be gone.”

His arms tighten around her, his hand cradling the bottom of her head as she sobs into his neck.  

“Sorry,” she says.  “I know that shouldn’t matter.  But it does.  I didn’t think you’d matter to me this much, but you do.  And I know you’ll call, and visit, and try to help but…” she pulls away and takes a deep breath, “But you won’t be here to knock on my door when I can’t sleep.  You won’t be here to ask me what’s wrong, and you won’t be able to see my face and raise your eyebrows and I like that.  It keeps me honest.  It makes me feel like I’m not alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he tells her again, and this time, she doesn’t respond.  She just tugs her knees up to her chest, the way she’d been riding in the car, as though trying to use them to shield her heart.

“Do you know what it feels like to stop being lonely?” she asks him at last.

“No,” he tells her.

From anyone else, he’d expect something—a _pity party_ perhaps, cooing condolences, or an eye-roll—but from Rey, he knows she’ll take it at value, somehow. 

She continues.  “You become so afraid that you’ll be alone again.  That’s what I am right now.  I know that I have Finn, but I’m so afraid that something will happen and I’ll be out with nothing.  Only this time with a stack of medical bills I can’t pay and a body that’s slowly degenerating on itself.  And then I’ll die alone.”

“What did I just say?” he asks her firmly.

The smile she gives him isn’t the same one that makes her face light up, that makes his heart stop beating.  This one is sad, this one is tearful, and he pulls her close once again.

“You give good hugs,” she tells him.  “I feel safe when you hug me.”  His arms tighten around her.  “And I like when you do that.  When you feel things more and you just hold on tighter.  Maybe that’s why I like you so much.  I know you’re not going to let me fall.”

He doesn’t even begin to know what to say to that.  If he had the guts, he’d joke about how they’d both fallen on their asses only hours before, when she’d accidentally almost groped his groin after they’d found his parents’ home porn.  But he can’t joke right now.  Not even his bleak sense of humor fits right now.  He can’t joke with Rey.  Rey’s too important to joke about somehow.

_You’ll be gone in a few days and then what?_

He wonders what it will be like to break his own heart.  He’d always thought that people overreacted when they talked about shit like that.  How could they not? But Rey—more than anyone else in the world—has the capacity to make him break his own heart and that’s honestly terrifying.

_When you feel things more, you just hold on tighter._

He could laugh; he could cry.

“You’ve been having trouble sleeping?” he asks her.

“Yeah,” she says.  “I’m nervous.  Anxious.  My head won’t stop spinning.”

“I know that feeling,” he says softly.  He doesn’t ask when he lies them both back down on the bed, curling around her the way he had the day of his father’s funeral.  Somehow, asking seems unnecessary, mundane.  He gets the feeling more and more that he and Rey understand one another in a way that’s deeper than words.

Maybe that’s why he’s able to fall asleep when he’s got her in his arms.

Maybe that’s why she’s able to fall asleep when she’s there too.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ordinarily I'd update tomorrow to keep my weekly Tuesday cadence but 1) it's a weird day and 2) it's going to be a busy week so here we are.

Ben wakes in Rey’s bed, and he’s hard again.  He can’t even pretend he’s surprised by that.  She’s warm and she likes him and she makes him feel like he could melt, like he could be reduced to nothing and somehow that would be ok. 

It feels good, being hard against her.  Too good, really.  He can feel a little bit of dampness in his underwear where he’d been leaking a little bit. 

What had he been dreaming about?  He can’t remember. 

He can’t remember, but he can guess that it was probably Rey.

He wants to tighten his arms around her, but he doesn’t want to disturb her at all.  _When you feel things more and you just hold on tighter._

 _What if you came back with me?_ he thinks wildly.  _There’ll be doctors in the city, and then I could continue to help keep reality at bay?_

But somehow he doubts she’d take him up on that.  She already feels like a burden, after all, and leaving and going to the city would probably also make her feel like she was abandoning his mother, her friends, the life she’d started building here, the life that doesn’t include him.

_You’ll be gone again in a few days, and then what?_

How odd it is, to feel strengthened by the memory of her tears.  She wanted him to stay, right?  She wouldn’t have said that unless she wanted him to stay.

 _Stay,_ every instinct in him is saying.  _Fix things with your mother.  Look forward, not back.  Stay.  Stay with Rey._

Rey stirs in his arms and makes a bit of a squeaky whining noise as she burrows deeper into his chest, her hips rubbing against his hard-on and his breath catches as his eyes roll into the back of his head.  _So good._

She stills and a moment later she’s pulling back, flushing.  “Sorry,” she mumbles.  It’s so cold without her.  He sits up, bending his knees and resting his forearms on them, doing his best to hide the erection from sight.  She’s peeking at him out of the corner of her eyes and a moment later, climbs off the bed completely. 

The room is bright.  It must be late morning by now for it to be so bright.  “I’m going to put a pot on for coffee,” Rey mumbles and is gone.

Ben takes a deep breath and lies back down on the bed.  The pillow smells like the strangest combination of her and home.  It does nothing to ease the aching in his pants.

Which is why he ends up getting out of bed and heading into the bathroom.  He turns on the shower, lets it run for just a moment, before stripping down to his skin and stepping under the steaming water.  He closes his eyes.  And then, because he’s never been good at the whole self control thing, he grabs the soap bar—lavender and oatmeal, the same kind his mother has gotten for years—and sudses up his hand. 

He lets out a long breath as he runs his hand up and down his shaft, and it gets lost in the misting heat of the shower.  And he knows he shouldn’t—for so many reasons—but his mind is full of Rey.  Rey’s smile and the way her eyes can dance, Rey’s ferocity when it was needed, Rey’s hand in his, Rey warm in his arms.  And because of course it would happen with his cock in his hands, Rey’s legs in that dress of his mother’s, stretching on for days.  In his mind’s eye, he peels off the dress, licks down her spine as he unzips it from behind and lets it fall to the floor.  She sighs as she turns to kiss him and he is losing himself in the way her breasts—small, but not unreasonably small—feel against his chest (soft, so very soft). 

His breathing grows ragged as he imagines her biting her lip—a little shy, _we shouldn’t be doing this, technically you’re my stepson_ —before she rises onto the tips of her toes and kisses him, her tongue sweeping across his lips, sweet and strong and he’s tugging at his cock as though his life depends on it, harder and faster than he’s ever done before, really, because he’s never wanted anything quite as much as he wants to feel her lips against his.  She kissed his cheek the other day, and told him he could be sweet sometimes.  She’d cried in his arms at the idea that he might leave.  It’s not unbelievable to think that she might want him, right?  Right?

He spends silently, his heart thudding in his chest, his cock twitching in his hand, his cum—he knows, though his eyes are closed—dripping down the wall of the shower before getting washed down the drain.  When he opens his eyes, he’s back in his bathroom, alone.  Rey is downstairs, probably with his mother, and yes—there’s some of his cum dripping down the tile.  He steps aside slightly to let the streaming shower wash it away. 

“Morning,” his mother says when he makes it to the kitchen.  She’s sitting at the island, drinking coffee, a bowl of yogurt in front of her that doesn’t look like it’s been touched.  She’s looking at her crossword.

“Morning,” he replies.  Rey’s not there, but there’s a mug for him next to the coffee filter. 

His mother looks up.  “Sleep ok?” she asks.

“What?”

“You have a bit of a spring in your step.  You look awake.”

A flush creeps up his cheeks and he turns away from her fast so she doesn’t see it, grabbing the coffee mug. 

“Ok, I guess,” he replies.

“The quiet probably does you good,” she says. “I never sleep well when I’m in a city.  Too much energy all around me.”

Ben nods, and sips his coffee, turning back to face her. 

“You gonna get to that yogurt?” he asks her at last.

Leia rolls her eyes.  “You and Rey both, honestly.  I’ll get to it when I’m done with my crossword.”

“I know grief is intense, mom, but make sure you eat, ok?” Ben says.  “Even if you’re not hungry.”

She goes still, and looks down at her crossword again as though just trying to find a place to rest her eyes that’s not him.   It takes him a moment to realize she’s crying.

“Mom—hey—” he says stepping forward and putting his mug down on the island next to her crossword.  He wraps his arms around her and she curls a hand up around one of his arms. 

“I feel useless,” she mumbles.  “I can’t even eat.  I hate feeling useless.  I wish the Senate were in session so I could be doing something.”

“You’re doing a lot, actually,” he tells her firmly.

“Like what?  I can’t even go through his things without shutting down.  I can’t even—”

“You’re taking care of Rey,” Ben says firmly.  “And you’re—you’re here with me too.”

She looks up at him sharply.  “As if both of you aren’t taking more care of me than I am of you,” she says.  “Nice try, though.”

“Gotta make dad proud somehow.”

It takes her a moment, but she starts to laugh and it’s the most wonderful thing, really. 

“God, he could never talk himself out of anything.  For a man that charismatic…” She looks up at Ben.  “You have his heart, you know.  You don’t like a bully, and when you’re caught in something that’s wrong, you do your best to get out.”

“Thanks, mom,” he says, his voice a little thick. 

“You also have your head up your ass sometimes the way he did, but if he learned to pull it out sometimes, I have faith that you will too.”

“Thanks mom.”

She smiles up at him.  Then she slowly lets go of his arm and he takes a step back.  She reaches for her yogurt and spoons some of it into her mouth.  Then another bite, and another. 

By the time Rey reappears, her hair now damp from a shower too, the bowl is empty.

“Shall we?” Rey asks him, jerking her head towards the basement.

“Yeah,” he says.

They replace the lamp, and sweep up the broken glass they hadn’t gotten to the night before.  They eject the tape and put it back on the box of home movies, which they silently agree to never speak of ever again and Ben knows, when she’s ready, his mother will handle.

Then they start going through boxes.

“Do you always drink so much?” Rey asks quietly as they rip back taped cardboard.  Ben looks up at her. “You were really drunk last night,” she says.  “And have drunk a lot while you’ve been home.  Is it just all this, or do you really drink this much?”

From anyone else—from his mother, or Luke, or even an ex-girlfriend, he’d snap that it was none of her fucking business, and he’s an adult, and he can do what he wants. 

“Probably not this much,” he says at last.  “Last night was—“ he cuts himself off largely because he doesn’t know what to say.  In the sober light of day, everything feels… “I do drink, though.”

“Oh—drinking is fine,” Rey says.  “I’ll never drink, but I don’t judge people for drinking.  But last night you seemed a little gone.”  She swallows.  “I don’t want you to turn into my father.”

He squares his shoulders, and pushes the memory of drinking himself sick the night he’d learned his father had died out of his mind as he says, “It was an anomaly.”

Not quite a lie, not quite the truth, but she looks relieved when he says it and that’s enough to make him commit to it.  He’s not an idiot, he knows drinking’s bad for him, but somehow it’s easier to take care of himself when Rey’s looking relieved that he’s doing it and not having to make himself care about himself.

How is it that she does this?  Make him believe in himself, make him think he can be more than he is, make him want to be everything she seems to see in him, and somehow think that he might be able to pull that off?

They find spare car parts and decades old household items and what looks like the winter wear from four centuries ago.  Piles and piles and piles of crap.  Ben knows his father was the type to find a use for everything, but this all seems a little extreme.

After about an hour, Rey strips off the sweatshirt she’d been wearing and pulls her hair up into a higher ponytail than it had been in before.  She fans her t-shirt away from herself for a moment before opening another box and freezing.

“What is it?” he asks.

She picks up a jacket and Ben recognizes it right away.  “He was looking for it,” Rey says and her voice is small with tears she’s trying not to—no, no she’s crying them.  “He was complaining that your mother had thrown it out while he wasn’t paying attention but it was down here the whole—”

There’s a lump in Ben’s throat.  He remembers that jacket.  That was the _dad’s watching his soccer games_ jacket, the _it’s almost winter but not quite_ jacket, the _Han he’s cold give him your jacket_ jacket.  He reaches for it. 

It wouldn’t fit him now—not even close.  He’d long since grown broader and taller than his father ever was. 

But it might fit Rey.

So he takes it from her and spreads it out and hands it to her and she looks at him with wide eyes.  “What?  No—I couldn’t.”

“It’s not going to fit me,” he says.  “And you were his wife.  Go on.”

It fits her perfectly and she looks damn good in it.  Like she’s one of the family. 

He’s too far gone down whatever he’s feeling about her to even weakly protest that that might mean sister.  No—no.  She looks like something else.

“Looks good on you,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” she says, her voice still a little thick.  “Sorry.  I wasn’t expecting—I thought it would just be junk down here.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “Want to take a break?”

“Let’s finish this box, since it’s open.”

Ben nods.

Under three scarves that look like they’ve been eaten through by mice, they find—

“Are these yours?”

“Yeah, they’ve got to be.”

His hockey skates from high school.  Several pairs of them, actually, because his foot size had grown between seasons one year.

“I can’t imagine you skating,” she says.

“Like you can’t imagine me playing baseball?” Ben asks.

“I don’t know—you’re just—you don’t strike me as the most athletic type.”

“I was a three sport athlete in high school and played club sports all through college, but fine.  Not athletic,” he snorts. 

“It’s not that I don’t think you’re strong,” she says.  “More that I don’t think you have time to.  You seem like you’re too pent up.”

“Pent up?” Ben protests.

“Oh please,” she retorts.  “Tell me you’re not.”

“I’m not pent up,” he replies at once.  “And I shoot hoops twice a week with Mitaka.”

“Why didn’t you play basketball in high school?  You’re really fucking tall.”

“Because skating makes you feel like you’re flying,” he shrugs. 

“Does it?” Rey asks.

“Have you never skated?”

Rey shakes her head.  “Jakku, remember.  Desert sunshine and no ice rinks that aren’t going to turn into swimming pools in four seconds.”

Ben looks down at the skates.

“What’s your foot size?”  She tells him, and he hands her the skates he’d worn his freshman year of high school.  “I’m taking you skating.”

❖

“And you’re sure we’re not going to fall all the way through?” Rey asks for the fifth time.  It’s a clear day, and not actually that cold out.  She’s wearing her oversized jacket again, and she’s sitting in the snow and he’s tying his skates as tight as he can around her ankles.

The skates are a little too big for her, but they’d shoved some socks in the toe to make up the difference and he’s giving her as much ankle support as he can.  The laces are old, but they aren’t snapping from the strain which is a good sign.  The skates could definitely use some sharpening, but this will do.

“It’ll be fine,” he says.  “I used to skate on this pond all the time.”

The pond in question is on the other side of town.  It’s not the one in the national park—on which it is forbidden to skate in winter—and it’s not the one near the grocery store because Old Man Nunb will tell you that it’s private property even if Ben’s looked up the town records four times and it certainly isn’t.  This one’s the one down the road from the town dump, hidden in summer by thick trees and in winter—just visible from the road. 

He helps her to her feet and steps out onto the ice.  Then, because he can’t help himself, he sweeps off across the surface of the pond.  “See?” he calls after her.  It doesn’t even creak under him.  It’s probably been frozen for a good two months.  The ice is more than thick enough and Ben moves quickly and knows what to listen for. 

And it does feel a bit like he’s flying, like he left every single one of his problems back in the snow as he races across the ice.  This is what it used to feel like—this was why he liked sports, like doing things with his body for a few minutes and letting his mind shut off.  His body was reliable, strong, good at doing what needed to be done.  He could be the star of the show without worrying about letting anyone down because he never let anyone down in sports.  Somehow, that pressure didn’t exist for him when he played.

God he hasn’t felt that way in years.

He circles the lake three times before stopping short a few feet in front of Rey.  “See?” he says a little breathless.  “The ice is fine.”

She’s staring at him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide.  For a moment, he wonders if he did something wrong. 

“I’m never going to be able to move like that,” she says.

“You will,” he tells her.  “I’ll teach you.”

“Yeah, but not like that.  Not like I’m flying.”

“You won’t know until you try.”  He holds out a hand.  “We’ll go slow.  No helmets, so nothing crazy.  Don’t want you falling and hitting your head.  Also—if you fall, try and land on your butt.  It’s got the most padding.”

She takes a step onto the ice and—“Careful”—because she doesn’t slip but she does wobble a little bit as she gets used to standing on skates.  Her grip on his hand is so tight and she reaches out her other hand to grab at him too.  They stand there for a moment.  “How do you feel?”

“This is weird.”

“I’m gonna pull you out to the middle.”

“Don’t—”

“Too late.”

And he’s pulling her back with him, slowly, and her hands get impossibly tighter in his, her eyes locked on his face.  “Don’t let me go,” she tells him.  “Don’t pull some sort of trick and leave me—”

“I won’t,” he promises her.  “I won’t leave you, and I won’t let you fall.”  He looks down at her feet in his old skates.  “You feel sturdy?” 

“Yeah,” she replies.

“Ok,” he says.  And he begins.

He’s never actually taught anyone to skate before.  There’s never really been a reason for him to in his life.  He doesn’t have siblings or cousins, and Lando’s kids only ever came to visit in the summer.  He didn’t go to hockey camp because he usually went to the capital with his mom, or went on long drives with his father that he suspected were more about doing client runs than actually spending time with his son. 

But Rey seems to get it, somehow.  “Did you roller blade?” he asks her as her motions get smoother and smoother and smoother. 

Rey shakes her head.  “I roller skated sometimes.  Does that count?”

“No,” he says.  “They’re not in-line.  Though I suppose the toe thing would help if these were figure skates.”

“Figure skates?”

“The kind they use for ice dancing.  It’s got a toe-pick.  That’s how they stop and do some of their jumps and stuff.”

After a little while, she lets go of one of his hands, though not both.  They skate side by side, and she’s not even doing the thing that so many novice skaters do when they are first starting where she’s picking her foot straight up, keeping her legs stiff, nervous about balance.  She’s pushing off smoothly, easily. 

“I knew you’d be good at this,” he tells her.

“Had a good teacher,” she shrugs.

“I sincerely doubt that,” he says.

“It doesn’t feel like flying yet,” she says, and when she looks at him, his mouth goes dry.  “I want to fly.”

“You don’t have a helmet,” he says, knowing her response before she even says it.

“You said you wouldn’t let me fall.”

They’re still skating in a loose circle around the pond and Ben looks down at her.  “Hold on tight,” he says.  “And you tell me if you can’t keep up, or if you’re losing your balance.”

“Yes,” Rey says.

For a split second, a fraction of a breath, Ben can see her lying on the ice, blood pouring out of her head because she’d fallen without a helmet.  He can see life leaving her eyes, as he frantically screams for someone, anyone, and holds her close so she doesn’t die alone.

Then he’s taking off and like with every other anxiety he’s ever had, he leaves the thought behind as he dashes across the ice, Rey’s hand firmly in his.  She lets out a whoop of joy, and a he hears her moving her skates, trying to keep up with him, and suddenly he’s not pulling her at all.  She’s even with him, going just as fast as he is.

They’re flying together. His heart’s in his throat, in her hand, and they’re flying together.

When they reach the other end of the pond, he brings them about, twirling her close so that she’s stopping right in the circle of his arms.  For half a moment, he wonders if he’s imagining that her eyes drop to his lips.  It’s fleeting, ephemeral like the way her breath puffs in little white gusts before fading into the air, because now her eyes are scanning the pond. 

“Thanks for showing me,” she says.  “This is wonderful.”

She peeks up at him again, smiling almost shyly.  “I’d never have thought to take myself skating.  Now I might.  After you’re gone, I mean.”  He imagines her out here by herself, or maybe with Finn.  “It’ll make me think of you.”

If he breathes he’ll break it—this feeling in his chest, the warmth in his hand as she squeezes it for just a moment.

 _This is like a dream_ , he tells himself as they skate slowly back to the edge of the pond.  _You never were going to have a life like this.  This is a dream._

_A dream you’re about to wake from._

But he doesn’t want to.

He can’t say he feels like a boy again, like a child because he’s come home.  Home has always been hard.  He’s always been too much for home.  This feels almost like what home could have been if he were a different person, if he’d lived another life.  Life where he gets along ok with his mother, and there’s a girl who smiles at him and holds his hand.

 _Stay,_ comes a little voice in his head.  _Stay here.  Why don’t you?_

_You could._

Rey’s sitting in the snow, taking off her—his—skates and putting on her boots again and he sits down next to her. 

It’s as he’s tugging off his first skate that the snow hits him.  He looks up, expecting to see an innocent branch that had just divested itself of some snow onto his head, but Rey starts laughing next to him and he turns his head so fast he gets a crick in his neck.  “Oh that was a mistake,” he says at once.  She’s on her feet already, though, laughing, gleeful—she looks so young, so easy, so carefree—and she’s running away because she’s already got her boots on.

Ben hurries to get off his other skate, shoves his foot into his boot and is running after her now, bending to scoop up some snow and pound it into a neat, compact ball and—with the precision of someone who played baseball for ten years—hits Rey right in the collarbone with it.

She squeals and bends down to make another snowball and he catches her right on the side of the hip.  Her throw goes wild and he sends another one right at her chest, but this time she manages to swat it away.

“I may have miscalculated,” she calls.

“Might have happened,” he replies taking another step towards her.  “Do you yield?”

“What is this—the middle ages?” she asks.

He throws the snowball and bends to make another.  “Do you yield?” he repeats.

“Never.”

And she sends a snowball at him that catches him right along the side of his face, dripping down his cheek.

The battle is ruthless, the snow—untouched when they’d first arrived—is churned and a mess by the time that Ben slips and falls and Rey holds her snowball up high, ready to smack him in the face again.  She’s ferocious and indomitable and—even when he holds up his hands and, feeling like his father, says, “Ok, ok,” she nods once, then drops the snowball right in his face with a smirk.

He lunges at her, grabbing her by the knees and tugging her down into the snow with him.  “That was dishonorable.”

“What’s honor among thieves?” she says in a voice that’s such a clear imitation of his father that it sort of takes his breath away.

She’s so close, and it’s terrifying.  Every time she’s close, every time she’s looking like this, he imagines kissing her, the scent of lavender oatmeal filling his mind and god he wants to hold her, wants to keep her safe, because keeping her safe feels like keeping himself safe.

The wind rustles.  Branches creak. 

“We should get back,” he says.

“Yeah,” she agrees, looking away.  She gets to her feet first, and helps him up.  Then they make their way back to his car.

❖

“Ben, there’s a message for you,” his mother calls the moment they make it through the door.

“Hm?”

“Someone from work called.”

He goes still.  “They got your number?”

“Apparently I was your emergency contact back when you first got this job,” she replies from the kitchen.  “It’s on the answering machine.”

He goes into the kitchen and frowns as he jabs the play button with his finger.  Snoke’s voice crackles out of the speaker.  “It’s time for you to come back.  I understand the predicament with your family, but we need you here, now.  This merger may fall through and I don’t want that to be on your head, especially not as we head into review season and I’m going to have to justify your promotion to HR.  Your family can wait.  Your future cannot.  Turn your phone back on and check in, please.”

There’s no sign-off.  He hadn’t even called Ben by name.  His mother would probably have had to guess who this was and when he looks at her, she’s got such a tired look on her face.

“You should go,” she says softly.

“What?” Ben says.  Of all the things that could end up coming from his mother’s lips, he hadn’t expected that.  She, who had told him to quit his job only a few days ago, who thought it was beneath him.

She takes a deep breath.  “I’m trying to be supportive,” she says.  “It’s your life, your future.  If it’s what you choose, you should do it.  You can come back another time, he’s right.  We’ll be here.  But if it’s risking a promotion you’ve worked hard for…”

She’s been preparing to say this to him, ever since the answering machine picked up.  She’d been preparing to tell him that—that—

“Do you want me to go?” he asks her, his voice low.

“Ben, I want you to be happy,” his mother sighs.  “If this is going to make you happy, then that’s what I want for you.  It’s not what I expected for you—or would choose for you.  But if you’re choosing it for yourself, then I trust you to pick the things that make you happy.”

“Why?” he asks.  “I have a terrible track record with that.”

“It’s not like I picked things that were better for you,” Leia responds evenly.  “Law school.  Divorcing your father.”

Ben suddenly feels very tired—ironic because he’d slept ok, curled around Rey in her bed.  He looks around the kitchen. 

He doesn’t know what to do.

Rey hadn’t followed him into the kitchen.  She’d gone upstairs, and he can hear her up there, moving around.  She’d cried at the idea of him leaving.  Him leaving now, even though it’s only a few days earlier…

_Ripping the band-aid off might be easier.  Instead of having more days where we laugh and smile and—_

“Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah, ok.”

His mother gets up and she takes both of his hands, looking at him sternly.  “I’m not saying you should go because I want you to leave.”

He knows that.  He believes that.  It’s unexpectedly fortifying.

“I’ll come back up when I can,” he promises her, his voice sounding a little hollow.  “And I’ll call.”

“Please call,” his mother says, tears in her eyes.  “I want to keep talking to you, Ben.  I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too.”  He takes a deep breath, jerking his head towards the staircase.  “I should—”

“Yes,” she replies.  “Can I help with anything?”

“Nah, it’s just shoving my shit back in my bag.”

“All right,” she says. 

He feels like a dead man walking as he makes his way up the stairs to his bedroom.  Slowly, he gathers the clothes he had lumped together in a ball and shoves them back into his suitcase.  He strips the bed and pillow cases, grabs the towel he’d used and brings them to the hamper in the bathroom.  Then he picks up his suitcase and takes it downstairs. 

“Ben?”

He’s only halfway down the stairs when he sees Rey standing on the landing, staring at him.  She looks pale, her eyes are bright, and her mouth is slightly open.  Surprise?  Confusion? 

“I need to get back,” he says.  His voice doesn’t sound like his own.

“Oh.”

One little syllable—and yet how full of everything.  Her breath shakes, even in the quiet.  Her nostrils flare.  Her eyes get a little brighter. 

“Yeah.  Work stuff.”

“Of course,” she says.  Her voice is hollow now too.  Her voice is empty.  She’s breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling.  His eyes are prickling as he looks up at her.  _Ripping the band-aid off,_ he reminds himself. 

“Drive safely,” she says at last, and he hears them then, the unfallen tears in her voice.

“Yeah.” Can she hear his?

He doesn’t move.  Neither does she.  His suitcase gets heavier and heavier in his hand.

“Right I should—”

“Come back,” she whispers and there it is—the first tear gleaming on her cheek.  “Come back soon, ok?”

“Yeah.  Yeah—I—I’ll come back.”

She doesn’t come down the stairs to give him a farewell hug.  She doesn’t move at all.  He meets his mother on the landing and gives her a hug, and upstairs, he hears a door clicking shut. 

“Call me when you get home,” his mother says, and he gives her a nod.  The house seems so quiet.  His ears are straining to see if he can hear the sound of Rey crying.

He can’t.

But it’s as though that single, glistening tear is drilling its way right through his heart as he makes his way down the shoveled front walk towards his car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I commissioned some art of this chapter from the talented proporgo. You can see it [here](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter/status/1138165343862452224)!


	6. Chapter 6

He drives until late in the night, the radio getting less and less static-y as he goes further and further south.  The snow gets less deep, the cars less salt-stained.

He reaches the city around midnight—hardly late for him, but it feels late.  He feels exhausted.  He can’t stop thinking about Rey, about that quiet plea.  _Come back._

 _This was a mistake,_ he tells himself.  But he keeps on driving. 

He eats alone at a roadside diner, checking the emails on his phone to get a sense of what would await him tomorrow.  He barely takes in any of it, no matter how many emails he reads. 

He calls Snoke before he gets back in the car.

“I’m on my way,” he says.

“Good,” is Snoke’s reply.  “My expenses are also waiting for you, if you can get them sorted first thing.”

“Yes,” Ben says.  He hates doing expenses.  Once, it had been something he found calming—dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and making sure that everything was neatly in order.  But the idea of going into the office and doing Snoke’s expenses first thing tomorrow when he still should be on time off…

He calls his mother next.

“Did you speed?” she asks him.

“No, I’m at the diner off of 60,” he replies. 

“Oh, that’s a good one.”

“Yeah.”  He pauses.  It’s cold enough in the dark that he can still see his own breath puffing out in front of him.  “How is she?”

“I haven’t seen her since you left,” his mother replies.  “She hasn’t come down.”

“Check on her.”

“I’ll make sure she eats,” Leia says.  “And also that I eat.”

“Good,” he says.

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“Did something happen?  With you and Rey?”

Ben closes his eyes.  He thinks of her smile, thinks of her warm and tucked under his chin, thinks of the way she rolled her eyes and defended him from himself, thinks of her in his dad’s coat and his old skates, thinks of her throwing snow at him.  “No,” he says.  “No, nothing happened.”

“Oh.”  Is that disappointment?  “I just wondered is all.”

“She’s dad’s widow,” he says.

“Oh, horse shit, you know the truth now, Ben.”

“How would you explain it to Uncle Luke?  Without giving up the ghost?”

“I don’t know, we’d figure something out.  Ben—”

“Nothing happened, mom.”

“Sometimes that’s when it happens the most,” she says firmly.  “Sometimes nothing is more meaningful than something.”

“You’re the one who told me to leave,” he says.  “It’s better this way.  It’s life.  She has a life and I—I have mine.”

His mother doesn’t say anything at all.  They stay on the phone for a good minute before he says, “I should get back on the road.”

“Call when you get in.”

“I will unless it’s late.”

“Call anyway.”

South and south and south he drives.  He hits city traffic about an hour out, and it stretches on forever because there was a nasty pile-up on the bridge.  He gets home and it’s past ten pm, but he calls anyway, even though he knows his mom’s likely nearly asleep.

“Hello?”  Is he imagining it, or did someone else start to say hello at the same time as his mother. 

“I’m home,” he says.

“Good,” his mother replies. “I was starting to worry.”

“Shitty traffic luck,” he says. 

“Well, I’m glad you made it.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”  His mother hangs up, but Ben doesn’t.  He waits just a fraction of a moment longer and hears a second phone hanging up too.

For a moment, he thinks of going to his liquor cabinet and downing an entire bottle of whiskey.  But he remembers Rey in the basement earlier that day—god had it really been that morning?—asking him if he always drank that much, and it hurts so much but he also can’t bring himself to do it.

That’s when he sinks into his chair, and puts his head in his hands and does everything he can not to cry.

❖

Ben’s alarm goes off at five thirty in the morning.  He drags himself out of bed.  He takes himself to the gym for the first time in a week.  He hadn’t realized how sore skating had made him until he’s doing squats and his legs keep protesting.  He does his best to shake it off.  He’d long ago accepted the post-break muscle soreness of the first workout.

And besides, it makes him think of Rey.

He hopes she wakes up and is happier today.  He hopes that she can put on a brave face.  He hopes she calls Finn to help her with his dad’s shit in the basement.  He hopes she doesn’t hate him.  He hopes she doesn’t hate herself.

He showers, shaves, dresses and takes himself to the office, arriving while the place is still decently empty.  He boots up his computer, does Snoke’s expenses, takes off his auto-reply _I am out of the office please direct all messages to Armitage Hux (ahux@fo.org)_ and stares at his screen for a good five minutes before convincing himself to open up some of the documents he’d seen attached to his emails.

There are sales numbers, and financial statements and _PROPRIETARY INFORMATION DO NOT FORWARD_ and warnings from legal about employment law that Snoke was clearly trying to get around.  He reads through a long, angry chain with the head of product development about how they don’t have enough headcount to sustain the additional project work of integrating with Empire and they’ll need at least ten more heads—fifteen if they can get it.  Snoke hadn’t replied at all, leaving the task to Phasma, who never gives enough headcount to anyone because she was a _get it done for less_ type of leader.

He reads email after email after email, and drinks coffee that doesn’t taste as good as the cup that Rey had made yesterday, and he feels colder than he had in that house, despite being significantly further south and in a better heated building.

He wonders if Rey’s awake.  Probably, right?  He wonders if she’s eaten, if his mother has eaten. 

He should eat.  He hasn’t yet this morning.  That’s probably part of why he’s so jittery.  So he gets up from his desk and heads to the kitchen.

“Oh, so you did make it back.”

“Morning, Hux.”

“How was the funeral?” 

“Yeah, because you cared so much the other day when you called.”

“Well fuck me for trying to be nice, I guess.”

Ben snorts. 

These are all the same words he’d have said a week ago—except they all feel hollow.  It’s not fun to cover hatred.  It’s not fun at all.

He feels empty.

His dad’s dead, and he left Rey behind.  _You won’t let me fall._

He shoves a muffin into his mouth and returns to his desk to more emails.

Snoke swoops in a little past ten in the morning.  He doesn’t say anything to Ben sitting at his desk just outside his office.  He doesn’t even look at him.  He goes into the office and closes his door.

_That’s why I don’t trust ‘em, kid.  People like that.  They don’t treat people like people.  No matter how much money you have, treat people like people._

When had his father said that to him?  He can’t remember.  It feels like reaching into a dark corner, trying to find something you dropped, and your hand gets covered in cobwebs.

“Are you sitting in on the sales call?” Hux asks him as he makes his way towards Snoke’s office.

Ben shrugs but doesn’t reply.  Hux rolls his eyes.  “As if you weren’t already a mopey fucking bastard,” he mutters and he goes into Snoke’s office, closing the door behind him.

Ten ticks on to eleven and Hux leaves the office and gives Ben a smirk.  At noon, Ben goes downstairs to find a sandwich, returning to find Snoke standing at his desk.

“Ah, there you are,” he says. “I need you in the next call.  Notes, please.”

Ben nods and grabs a pen and paper and follows Snoke into the office.

“It’s good you’re back,” Snoke says as Ben settles himself into the chair on the other side of your desk.  “I understand it’s…inconvenient.  But time will show it was the right choice.”

He thinks of Rey standing on that staircase, trying—and failing—not to cry.

“I’m sure you gleaned from the email, but everything is exploding.  Palpatine has been going against all of our previous agreements and rather than merging into First Empire is pulling out every gun he can find to make First Order a subsidiary.  And I did not build this company from nothing in order to become a fucking subsidiary, no matter how much I like and respect Sheev.  I’m sure we could have gotten it all sorted out, but I need you here.”

 _To take notes,_ Ben thinks.  _To not be in on the sales call that Hux was on._

“What’s important,” Snoke says.  “Is that you’re a fighter.  That you’ll get up off the dirt, and then you’ll turn into the man you were born to be.  It’s not like you were very close with your father, were you?”

He hears the crack of a baseball against a bat, his father’s whoop of pride as the ball sails high and far into the trees.  _You’ll make the majors if you keep swinging that strong._

_You know we love you, even if you do drop out.  Just don’t end up like your old man, ok?  Your mom couldn’t take it.  That’s all I ask._

_You got this.  Driving’s in your blood.  Stalling out a lot now means you’ll feel your way through and it’ll be easier next time.  Off and on again.  Let’s go._

Ben blinks.  Snoke had just said something, and he realizes that Snoke hadn’t actually expected him to reply.  “Either way, make him proud by showing how far you can come.  This merger—it will be the moment, I promise.  Help us crush the competition and we’ll make—”

“Sir?”

Snoke looks at him, surprised.  When has Ben ever interrupted him.  When was the last time any of his underlings interrupted him.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a family?”

Snoke rolls his eyes.  “You of all people know that I don’t.”

“Siblings, or—or parents?”

“Just me,” Snoke says.  “Though,” a pause, considering.  “Though sometimes I think of you as a son, my boy.”

Ben blinks at him. 

He has a dad. 

He’d gone and buried him and met and fallen in love with his new wife and hugged his mother while she’d cried.  He has a dad, and his dad had always—had always…

Ben gets to his feet.

Snoke raises his non-existent eyebrows.

“Sir, I’d like to thank you for the opportunities you’ve given me over the years.  But I’d like to extend my resignation.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Sir, my father always chose his family.  Every time, he chose what was right.  And I don’t want to exist to crush my enemies when my family needs me.”

“And if I don’t accept your resignation?” Snoke asks, leaning back in his chair.  “Because I don’t.”

“Then I fucking quit, effective immediately.” 

And he turns on his heel and leaves, ignoring Snoke’s shouts that he get back here at once, _at once_ , that he’s making a mistake—the biggest mistake of his life. 

Because he’s not.  He’s not making a mistake at all.

❖

He’s forty minutes out of the city when his stomach grumbles and his head starts to feel light.

He hadn’t had that sandwich. 

So he gets off the highway and finds a fast food joint and orders himself a burger and fries and remembers that he’d forgotten to leave his phone on his desk with his badge as he’d been marching out of the office. 

No one’s called it.  He’s surprised about that, actually.  Surely Snoke would be blowing it up if he thought that Ben were worth fighting for.  Except he had that call he wanted Ben in on. 

He pulls it out of his pocket and as he does, something falls on the ground at his feet. 

His dad’s gilded dice, on their chain. 

He swallows.  Rey had left those for him.  Dad had always said they’d brought him luck.

He’s about to chuck the phone in the trash right outside the diner’s door when he remembers something from a blur of days ago, from before he even liked Rey.

And he calls a number that he hasn’t called in years.

“This is Lando,” comes the familiar, rich voice.

“Uncle Lando?”

“Ben?”  He hears surprise there—because of course there’s surprise, why wouldn’t there be surprise?  “Everything ok?”

“About that job you offered me—is that still on the table?”

“Well shit,” Lando says, half-laughing.  “Are you serious?”

“Talk to me about salary and benefits.”

❖

He slows when he gets off the freeway, his father’s dice jangling gently from where he’d hung them on his rearview.  The roads are just as icy as they were the day before and he’s getting tired.  Turns out driving nearly ten hours in less than a day can take it the fuck out of you, especially after the adrenaline of quitting your job has worn off and the excitement of finding the new one has past.

_I’ll get you some paperwork right away.  I’ll send it to Leia’s.  Give me a week or two before you officially come on board so I can figure out what you’ll actually be doing._

God this has the potential to backfire.  So hard.  So intensely.  But at least if he’s thrown away his future, he’s thrown away a future that he didn’t want, that would have made him lonely and miserable forever, that _relied_ on his being lonely and miserable forever.

_There’ll be some travel.  There’ll have to be.  But you can work from wherever you like when you’re not on site._

God, what would his dad say—him working for Lando Calrissian?

He’d laugh, and say he hated it, but he’d be thrilled.

_I guess if I can’t make mom proud, making dad proud’ll do, right?_

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he hears his father saying, _I’m proud of you, kid._ Had that been after a baseball game? 

No—no.  It had been after he’d said he was dropping out of law school.  How had he forgotten that?

His throat gets thick and his eyes prickle for the millionth time this week.  Tomorrow, he decides, he’ll go to the gravesite.  People talk at graves all the time, tell the dead life updates.  And he’d never gotten to really say goodbye.

It starts to snow when he’s about forty minutes away from the house.  Not a light dusting, either—intense heavy flakes, wind so fierce that he hears it whistling around the car.  He has to stop the car for a few minutes because it’s starting to white out in his headlights and the last thing he wants to do right now is die in a car accident when he feels so alive.

He fidgets while he waits for the snow to lighten, but when it doesn’t start to, he decides to do the dangerous thing and keep going.  Slowly—as slowly as he can, keeping the car’s gear high like his dad taught him.  _High gear in heavy snow; turn into the skid when there’s ice._

He inches forward, carefully, slowly.  It’s hellish—especially when he just wants to get there, get to her.

He passes the spot where she’d skidded off the road.

He passes the detour around the bridge that’s out. 

He passes Maz’s watering hole, passes the farm stand where his mother gets her cheese, passes the pond where he had taken Rey skating.  Was it only yesterday?  Had he really only known her less than a week?

And there’s the house, just around the bend, around the trees.  The lights are on in his mother’s study, and he can tell from the way the living room windows are lit that they’re on in the kitchen too.  He parks the car and can see movement by the window in his mother’s study, someone peering out to see who’d driven up in this dark and snow.

He shoves his way through the snow, up the path, his bag over the shoulder and the door swings open and his mother’s standing there, bewildered.

“Ben?”

“I quit,” he says.  “Fuck that shit.”

And her face splits into a smile and she pulls him down for a hug. 

“We’ll figure out what comes next,” his mother says.  “You’ll take the time and figure out where—”

“I’m going to work for Lando,” he tells her, pushing past her into the house so she can close the door.  He toes off his boots while his mother stares at him. 

Then she rolls her eyes and lets out a snort.  “Did he give you a job offer at Han’s funeral?”

“Yes,” Ben says.

“Han would have loved that.”

“Yeah,” Ben agrees.  “He’s gonna send a contract here.  I hope that’s ok.”

“Yes, yes, that’s fine,” his mother says.  “Please stay.  As long as you’d like.”

Ben nods.  “I’ll need to figure out my shit in the city but I wanted to—”

He glances up the stairs. 

His mother’s hand comes to rest on his arm and he looks back down at her. 

Her eyes are bright and he’s never seen that expression on her face before—not ever.  It’s soft in a way that his mother’s not usually soft.  It’s hopeful in a way that’s not filled with political optimism.  She looks like she thinks he’s doing the right thing, like she thinks he’ll be happy at the end of all this.

“God, you are so like your father sometimes,” she says.  “Go on.”  And she marches towards her study again and closes the door.

He takes a deep breath and climbs the stairs.  He drops his suitcase by the door to his bedroom—his bed is still unmade, not that he’d expected them to have made it—and he goes and knocks on Rey’s door.

He waits for a response for ten seconds before lifting his fist to knock again.

The door swings open and there she is, her hair in a messy ponytail, wearing a ratty old t-shirt and some sweatpants.

“What?” she blinks up at him in shock, then, almost dreamily, “You came back.”

“Listen,” he says and he presses past her, closing the door behind him.  “We should get married.”

“What?”  A completely different kind of shock this time. 

“We should get married,” he repeats.  “That way you won’t have to worry about being without health insurance.”

She stares at him for a long time, then looks away, biting her lip.  “Oh,” she says, and it’s the same _oh_ as the staircase.  Why is it the same _oh_ as the staircase?

“What—“

“I just thought…never mind.” He can hear her voice getting thicker with every word.  She’s turning away from him.  Why is she turning away from him?  “Yeah, it’s an option I guess.”

“Rey—what—”

“I just—never mind.  It’s stupid, never mind.”

And it clicks.  He grabs her arm, and pulls her back to face him and his lips are on hers before she has the opportunity to say another word.  She squeaks a little bit into his mouth and it takes her a moment but she’s kissing him back and he can taste salt on his lips, tears dripping down her cheeks.

“Rey,” he breathes.

“Sorry,” she says and she’s crying now, fully blubbering and he pulls her close.  “Sorry I—I thought—”

“That I just wanted to marry you for health insurance.”

She nods.  “And I’ve done that before and it broke so much and it didn’t even work the way it was supposed to and now—”

“I want to marry you because I love you,” he says and she stops breathing, stops crying.  She doesn’t stop shaking, but the other two things stop.  “Because I can’t stop thinking about you, because I want to keep you safe and like how I feel about myself when I’m around you. And fuck—I’ve known you less than a week and maybe I’m crazy, but I’ve never felt like this ever.  Not ever, Rey.  It’s the opposite of like I’m losing my mind.  It’s like I’ve found it, or something.

“And maybe we don’t get married,” he says, and he feels like he’s begging her and he doesn’t care.  “Maybe we go to a place where you can get a different job and your own health insurance—I don’t care.  I just—I want to be with you.  I love you.”

She rubs her eyes and takes several deep breaths, steadying herself.  When she looks at him again, she’s blazing.

“I love you,” she whispers.  “For all those reasons too.  For everything I said the night before last, for taking me skating and making me feel like my problems weren’t real.  For coming—” she lets out another choked sob and a new stream of tears drip down her cheeks.  “For coming back.”

He tugs her into her arms again and this time, when he kisses her, she meets him in full force.  She clutches at the front of his shirt, and the kiss is extremely inelegant, maybe because she’s laughing a little bit, a little happy noise that makes his heart sing.  He keeps kissing her, will kiss her always if it makes her make that sound, if it makes her feel like he’s never going to let her fall—not ever, not ever again.

He kisses her, and kisses her, and knows he’s never going to stop.  How could he, now that he’s started?  No one he’s ever kissed, no one he’s ever touched—none of it is like Rey. 

Rey makes his heart forget how to beat because it was beating wrong his whole life and Rey’s taught it to beat right.  Rey makes his hands feel like they have a purpose when they hold her, makes his lips feel like they’re soft because they were made to kiss her, makes the whole world seem different, and new, and good.

They could have been kissing for an hour, for a day, by the time that Rey pulls him towards her bed.  She shoves aside a book that she’d clearly been reading and pulls him down next to her, kissing him.  Her hands are in his hair now, and with every passing second he feels himself getting harder and harder in his pants. 

She rolls him onto his back, straddling him and sitting up, looking down at him.  There’s something triumphant to her like that.  No nervousness, no shyness, no questioning her own value, her own worth.  She’s a goddess with her messy ponytail that he really should have tugged loose by now and the ratty t-shirt she’s wearing. 

Slowly, carefully she bends to kiss him, and—when her lips connect with his—her hips begin to move against his, rubbing right along his shaft.  If he wasn’t fully hard before, it doesn’t take long with Rey’s lips against his and her slit rubbing along his dick, even through several layers of fabric.  He groans when she rests her hands on his chest and before he can think whether or not he should ask, he sits up and tugs at her shirt, pulling it up over her head and she clearly doesn’t mind because her fingers are scrabbling at his waist, tugging his shirt up too and throwing it across the room where it hits the wall and slides down.

She pushes him back down on the bed and stares at him, breathing heavily, and the more heavily she breathes, the more her own beautiful breasts rise and fall.  The nipples are stiff, and the same color as her lips and he wonders if they’re as soft and is about to sit up again to kiss them when her hand rests on his shoulder.  Briefly, he notices injection marks bruising on her arm, small dark marks with little pinpricks at the heart of them.  He presses a kiss to the closest one and looks up at her.  She’d been staring at his chest, her cheeks a little flushed, but now she looks startled, then her face gets a little soft, her eyes get a little bright.

“What?” he asks her, even though he knows.

“Nothing,” she replies leaning forward to kiss him and he doesn’t need to kiss her breasts to find out how soft her nipples are, now, because they’re brushing against his chest, and that, with the pressure of her over his cock has him rolling them over, sucking on her neck, propping himself up on one elbow while the other hand cups at her breast.  It’s soft, and fits easily into his hand and he likes the way she gasps when he touches it.

“Ben,” she moans as he rolls her breast in his hand, as he brushes his thumb around her nipple and feels her skin break out in goosebumps.  “Ben, I—stop.”

He does, at once, pulling back.  “Are you—?”

“No, it’s just—” she’s flushing.  “I want to, I just—”

“You want time,” he says.  “No, that makes sense, this is overwhelming and—”

“Shut up, will you?” she says, rolling her eyes, her face getting redder.  “I just haven’t done this before, ok?  Go easy on me.”

He blinks at her.  “You haven’t—”

“Everyone thought I was married to your dad,” she replies.  “Sort of hard to have a dating life when you’re married to a town staple.”

“Oh, right.”  He says, catching his breath.  “I—” he gulps.

He’s old enough, now, where he doesn’t usually date women who haven’t had sex before.  Not that he dates much, period, and being with them has never made him feel anything the way a week with Rey has felt.  But he doesn’t think he’s ever slept with a virgin before.  Even his first time, Bazine had known what to do, had done it really well, and had even bought him pie afterwards.

She rolls her eyes.  “Don’t get stupid about it, I just wanted to make sure you knew.”  And she grabs him by the back of the head and pulls his lips back down to hers, kissing him with such enthusiasm that—well, he didn’t even really know where his brain was going.  He hadn’t even had time to process that initial surprise and now her hand is sliding down his chest and unbuttoning the front of his jeans and he really doesn’t have time to think more about it. 

Her grip on his cock is definitely unpracticed.  It’s a little too tight and he pulls his lips away from hers just long enough to say, “Easy, a little—”

“Sorry,” and it loosens and—

“Perfect.”

She lets out a huffy laugh and he groans because her finger swipes along the tip. 

“God, Rey, I—”

He’s twitching in her hand already.  His balls are unreasonably tight, given that they’ve only just started.  He hasn’t ever felt this overwhelmed in bed before—not since his first time, but here he is with Rey, trembling against her so much that she rolls him onto his back again and straddles him, his cock hanging out of his pants, the fabric of her sweatpants soft and different enough that he can almost catch his breath.

Except that she’s clambering off him and hooking her fingers in the waistband of those sweatpants and tugging them down her legs and there’s this glorious thatch of dark hair at the base of her torso and when she leans back to get the sweatpants all the way off, he catches a peep of pink from the middle of it.  He twitches again, and she looks at him, flushing. 

“I don’t have any sort of—”

He shakes his head.  “Me neither.”  He checks his watch.  “And the drug store is definitely closed.”

“I wouldn’t want you to go anyway,” she says.  “Tomorrow, but you just got back and—” she waves her head back and forth as though unable to put words to the feeling that Ben knows is twisting in her gut.  He pulls her forward. 

“What do you want to do?” he asks her.  Because the only thing he can really think right now is that she’s naked, and right above him, and it would take so little effort to just slide home.

“I could try blowing you,” she says, going a bit pink as she says it. 

“I could go down on you,” he says too.  He wants to.  He wants to know what she tastes like, wants to feel her fall apart because—as one drunken hookup had once told him—that’s the only way to really guarantee it.  He wants to.  He wants her to—

“Or you could pull out?” she asks carefully, her face even redder.  “If you’re clean and we don’t need—“

“Yeah,” he cuts her off.  “Yeah, I’m clean.  And yeah, I could try.”  He swallows.  “Yeah.  I could.  I would.”

“Ok,” she says.  “I’m going to—”

“Are you ready?” he asks her sharply.

She gives him the softest glare he’s ever gotten in his life.  “Look just because I haven’t—”

“I mean, are you aroused enough,” he says.  He can feel her dripping over him, but if she’s never had sex before—he knows he’s big.  

She licks her lips and Ben rolls her back onto her side and now it’s his turn to slide his hand down to her sex.

She’s wet and warm and soft and her breath catches in her throat as he runs his fingers over her folds.  He tests her entrance and she squeaks a bit.  No—no, she’s definitely not ready.  His lips find hers again, and he rolls her onto her back and kisses his way down her chest, big wet sloppy kisses, sucking her skin between his teeth, rolling it there while her breath stutters slightly.  He kisses his way down her stomach and—fuck—she’s got such a good stomach, he’d been too distracted by her breasts earlier, and finally, finally, reaches that thatch of hair.  He rubs his nose through it before stretching her legs wide a little bit and crawling around, his hard-on dragging along the blankets slightly as he settles himself down on the bed. 

He looks up at her.  She looks down at him.  She looks nervous, but also determined.

He doesn’t break eye-contact at all when he slides his tongue along her slit and he watches her breasts rise, watches her chest expand as she inhales.  “Oh.”  So different from the staircase.

And he sets to work.

No, not work.

Work’s something he quit not twelve hours ago.  This—

This isn’t work.  This is feeling her soften around him, feeling her blossom under his tongue as he licks up and down, and in and out, and sucks her clit between his lips.  Rey isn’t work.  Rey is anything but work.

She sighs and trembles as he licks and he tests at her entrance again with a finger while his tongue is on her clit.  There’s a little more give this time, but it’s not easy to slide in yet.  So he’ll keep going.  He’ll keep going, as long as it takes.  If that’s what she wants, and she’d been the one who’d wanted him inside her.  He wanted it too, but he’d have been content if this was where it stopped. 

“You nervous?” he asks her the next time he tests her entrance again, stroking lightly along her skin.

“No,” she says, then, chagrinned, “A little.  I’ve touched myself before, I don’t know why it’s different this time.”

“Because I’m not you,” he says.  “Because you have to let go.  You’re still holding on.  Let go.”

She swallows, and takes a deep breath and he flattens is tongue against her clit and he hums around it, letting the vibrations of the noise fill his lips and Rey let out a mewl and he feels her dribble a little bit against his fingers.  And this time—this time when he probes her, the finger slides in easily, right to the knuckle and _fuck_ is she hot and wet and god she’s going to end him so fast, isn’t she?

“That feel ok?”

“Yeah,” she replies a little breathily.  “Yeah—it—it feels ok.”

“More than ok?”

“A lot more than ok.”

“Good.”  And he keeps licking.

He licks until he’s got another finger in her, licks until she’s bucking against his lips, licks until she’s crying out and twisting on the bed and her vaginal muscles are clutching at his fingers, holding onto him like they don’t want to let go.  There’s a flush across her chest, and her nipples are so tight and her eyes are glassy, dazed as she props herself up a little bit once her aftershocks have gotten less intense. 

She’s still breathing hard and god her breasts are distracting when she breathes, the way they rise and fall like that.

Slowly, she tucks her knees up to her chest, away from him, before curling them under and kneeling on the bed.  She gulps.

“Should I—do you need—” She takes a deep breath.  “I mean—I’m ready if you want to, but if you want me to try—”

He sits up.  He’s still hard but not as close to the edge as he had been.  That’s probably a good thing, given that he’s going to have to have enough control to pull out.  “I’m fine,” he says.

“Isn’t it good etiquette?” she asks.  “Or—“ She’s babbling.  Nervous again.  So he leans forward and kisses her, his hands cupping his face.  His fingers smell like her and he knows his tongue will taste like her and she stills the moment it touches hers.

“Can I be on top?” she asks, breaking the kiss.  “Just to make sure I—”

He nods, and kisses her again, and lies down on the bed, guiding her across his hips again the way she’d been, clothed, however many minutes before.  She’s taking a deep breath—her breasts rising once again—and then her hand is on his cock, pumping it once before looking down and trying her best to angle it towards her.

Ben closes his eyes.

It feels like waking up with her curled against his side, like lavender oatmeal scented showers, like chasing her through the snow as though there was nothing to worry about in the world.  All that, except hot and wet and his breath coming in short bursts, hers coming in whimpers as she lifts herself a little bit, then slides on a little more, then lifts, then slides, lifts and slides.

He wants to open his eyes, to see how far along she is, to see himself inside her, but he can’t do it, not yet.  If he does, he’s done for.  So fucking done for, and he wants this to last.  He wants it to last forever.  And then, when it’s done, he has to remember to pull out.  He can do that.  He can bury himself in her but not lose himself.  He can.  He has to.

She stops moving, and he opens his eyes.  She’s on him to the hilt, looking down at where they’re connected before looking at him and flushing.

“You feel ok?” he asks her.

“It’s stranger than I thought it would be.”

“Good strange?”

“I think so?” she wiggles slightly and his eyes fucking roll into the back of his head because _fuck_ this is going to be hard, she feels so fucking good.  “I just need to get used to it.”  She cocks her head, biting her lip.  “How do you feel?”

He lets out a laugh low in his throat.  “I can’t exactly form words, that’s how I’m feeling.”

And she gives him a positively impish grin and leans forward and murmurs, “Good,” into his lips and starts to roll her hips.

Yeah, he can’t do words right now.

Not even a little bit.

The only thing in the world that is happening right now is that his dick is inside Rey and it feels fucking mindblowing.  She’s kissing his lips and has her fingers in his hair and he can feel her smiling, feel the puffs of her breath as she picks up the pace—fuck she’s picking up the pace _fuck_ —and—and—

He’s taking deep breaths.  Slow, shuddering belly breaths because he can’t be this close already, he can’t be.  They only just started. 

 _This is only the beginning,_ he tells himself.  _This is just the first time._ There’ll be time—so much time.  He’s going to love her for the rest of time and—

And he does his best not to shove her as he reaches down between them to push her off him.  He doesn’t think he’s exactly successful in that, but the more important thing is that when he comes, he’s coating his belly and hers with hot strings of semen and not coming inside her.

And just like that, it’s over.  It’s over, but it’s not over because Rey settles down on top of him and kisses him again.

“Yes, by the way,” she tells him.

“Hm?”

“As long as it’s for love and not health insurance, I’ll marry you.”

And he laughs.  He laughs, and she laughs and his lips find hers and they laugh themselves to sleep.

❖

There’s a hickey the size of a lemon on his neck and he stares at it in the bathroom mirror for a full five seconds.

His mother is going to be unbearable, is all he can think as he picks up his razor and starts shaving away the stubble that had grown in over night. 

Rey is in the kitchen when he comes downstairs and her eyes snap to his neck.  The sweatshirt he’s wearing doesn’t quite cover up the hickey and she flushes as she hands him a mug of coffee.

“I suppose there’s not going to be a subtle way to tell her,” she says.

“As if she didn’t notice that my bedroom door was open all night,” he replies. 

“She’s downstairs going through the tapes,” Rey says.  It takes them all of five seconds to burst into snorts and Ben takes a sip of his coffee.  That’s what coffee should taste like.  Laughter and Rey.  He kisses her because he can, and she smiles into his lips, her hand coming up briefly to rest on his chest, just over his heart.

He finishes his coffee, has some toast, and then he and Rey head down to the basement.  His mother is sitting in a corner, going through a box of very old magazines. 

“Morning,” Ben says.

“Morning,” she replies lightly and—just as Rey had done, her eyes land on his neck.  “Sleep all right?”

“Very good,” he replies.  “Rey and I are getting married.”

Whatever his mother had been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that.

“Married?”

“Yup.”  Ben takes her hand, and she wraps her other hand around his arm.

“You went straight from…from whatever to getting married.”

“Correct.”

She blinks a few times.  “You didn’t want to try dating first?”

Ben shakes his head.

“God, you are so like your father,” his mother mutters again.  “This is ridiculous.  I love you both, but this is ridiculous.”

“No more ridiculous than you and dad getting divorced to get her health insurance,” Ben says.  “I’d even go so far as to say it’s a little less ridiculous.”

“You’ve known each other a week, Ben.  And I love you both, and Rey, sweetheart, you know I love you.  But this is—” but she stops talking the moment her eyes land on Rey.  And her eyes go so very soft, and Rey’s hand tightens in Ben’s.

“Yes, a little less ridiculous, I suppose,” she says getting to her feet.  She comes over to them and gives Rey a kiss on the cheek and wraps her arms around both of them.  “Have you both eaten already?  I’m hungry.”  And she lets go of them and head’s up the stairs to the kitchen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Selunchen drew [ and I'll never be over it 😭😭😭 Y'all, thanks for coming on this ride with me. I'm so grateful for your support and hope from the bottom of my heart you enjoyed this <3](https://twitter.com/selunchen/status/1154128577861947397)

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! You can find me on twitter (@crossing_winter) or on pillowfort (crossingwinter)


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